I’m going to have a quick chat today about the role of estate agents in transacting business for vendors and for buyers.

I’ve always been a little bit amazed by how one agent can represent the interest of both the seller and the buyer, because you are promising the seller to get them the best price possible, the highest price possible. And then you are promising the buyer to get them the lowest price possible. And it’s the same deal. And I come from a legal background. I was a criminal lawyer for a number of years. So I’m used to an adversarial system where you go head to head with other people to get the best deal for your client. And so, this has always struck me as odd, this thing about representing both buyer and seller, in a transaction that can be worth several million euros. And it’s a system that seems to work very well in the UK. A lot of agents do represent both buyer and seller, and it’s all about having the listing in the UK, isn’t it? It’s all about, we have this property and then we show it and we also represent the buyers when they come and represent the seller. And I just, I think that sometimes it’s really hard to do both things and to promise with good grace and sincerity that you’re going to do the best for them. Oh, and you’re going to do the best for them as well. The Spanish system is a little different. It still happens because very often you can have both the buyer and the seller in your camp.

But in Spain, it’s a little bit less likely to happen because of the multi-listing system. The fact that very often, an agent will represent the seller of a property. So they’ll have the listing and then it’ll be a completely different agent who will actually have the prospective buyer. I kind of like it when that happens because, maybe it’s just my kind of training from a past life that kicks in because what I always try and do is to get the best deal possible for whoever I’m looking after, whether it’s a seller or the buyer. Whoever I’m representing, I want to get them the best deal. And what we’ve noticed in recent times is that its, I think it’s very difficult in Spain and particularly the Costa del Sol, to effectively be both a listing agent and a property finder for buyers. I think it’s very difficult to do both jobs really well.

I think traditionally we at Cloud Nine Spain have always been a property finder. So we, more often than not, will represent the buyer in the transaction. We hunt out the whole of market for the best options. We’ll go to various agents, who’ve got listings. We’ll try and hunt out the off market listings and opportunities. We’ll deal with developers. And then we’ll present the options, the shortlist if you like, to potential buyers. And that way we can remain completely objective. We can sit down with a buyer at the end of each tour and say, okay, “What did we really think of that villa or that apartment?” And we can, normally over a glass of wine or a beer, we can talk about what we thought, and it’s great because it means that we can do it from purely the buyer’s perspective. You don’t have to worry about offending a seller or making a silly offer to a seller because they’re not our client. You don’t worry about them. That’s somebody else’s client. And I think it’s always been difficult for an agency to do both roles effectively. And I haven’t really come across an agency who who do both roles effectively. So we’ve set ourselves up really as a property finder. Of course, we get our own listings because of that. People who buy from us, they want to sell through us. So very sometimes we become the other thing. We become the property lister. And in that instance, we’ll do our best to get the best deal possible for the vendor. And it rarely happens that we represent both parties. And when you’re selling developments, it’s even simpler because the developer doesn’t care. The developer has no personal interest in you, the buyer, it’s just, whoever comes along, whether it’s the first person in the queue or the 10th person in the queue who’s going to pay that price for that apartment. There’s normally no negotiation. It’s easy peasy. But yeah, I just wanted to bring this up because it’s always been a little bugbear of mine that, how can you do both jobs effectively and say, “I got the best deal possible for for the buyer. Oh, I also got the best deal possible for the vendor.” It can’t happen. It can’t happen.

So there are a lot of good agents out there who set themselves up as listing agents. There are a lot of good agents out there like us who set themselves up as property finders. And we’ve got a good reputation in the market for doing that. We’ve got a listing portfolio. Of course we have. But we always keep an eye on it. What we don’t want to do is we don’t want to become an agency with hundreds of buyer listings because then that would dilute the effect of what we’re going to do for our buyers. It would also mean that we’d have potentially 200, 300 vendors on the phone every day saying, “Why haven’t you solved my property today?” Which is something we wouldn’t be able to cope with from a resources point of view. And we like the fact that we work on on one side of the transaction, and that’s where we like to be, to try and get the best deal possible for our buyers. And when it’s flipped and we become the vendor’s representative, then we will do the same. We’ll try and get the best deal possible for them. But yeah, I don’t know if anyone has any comments on this because it’s really, I think it’s really interesting topic and it’s kind of a bit taboo, I seem to be covering a lot of taboo subjects these days. But yeah, as I say, with my background in the legal profession, I would never think of standing up and giving a closing argument for the prosecution, and then sitting down and then standing up again giving me closing argument for the defense. It wouldn’t really work. And I know it’s not as serious. We’re not talking about people’s freedom at stake here, but we’re still talking about a fair chunk of money. And yeah. And we’re just about to launch a specific property finding service for high net worth individuals. It’s interesting, sort of scoping it out, as to what our role is,. Do we charge an upfront fee for that service? And the thing is there there’s enough commission in these deals for it to become viable and you don’t need to charge an upfront commission but it’s just interesting to see what people think of this.

Whether people agree with me or disagree with me, whether I’m talking about rubbish, but I, as a buyer and I’m doing it in London at the moment, I’m buying a place, I as a buyer would feel uncomfortable if I knew that the agent was trying to represent not only my interest, but the interest of the person that I’m trying to negotiate with. Doesn’t make sense. Or does it? Anyway, over to you.