What Phil and Kirstie were actually selling

For twenty-five years, the British public has watched Location, Location, Location without quite noticing what the show is about.

Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsopp are not estate agents. They are buying agents, sometimes called property finders, hired by the buyer to be on the buyer's side.

Phil founded his own property search company, Garrington, back in 1996, and today it is the largest buying agency in the UK. Every episode is a demonstration of a real service that anyone can hire. Most viewers never twig.

The numbers bear this out.

A YouGov survey found that 69% of British buyers have never considered using a buying agent, mostly because they have never heard of one or do not know anyone who has.

Nearly half of UK adults believe that estate agents work for both sides.

They do not.

The estate agent is paid by the seller and works for the seller, full stop.

America sees it differently: 88% of buyers there purchase through their own agent, and going into the biggest purchase of your life without someone in your corner is considered odd. Here it is normal.

Developers and investors worked all this out long ago. They use sourcers and search agents as a matter of course, because the best opportunities rarely make it onto the portals and because a good finder pays for himself.

It is ordinary buyers, the people with the most at stake and the least experience, who go in alone.

Now move that picture to Portugal, where the paperwork is in a language you cannot read, the regions all blur into one on a map, and the estate agent showing you a quinta in the sunshine is doing his job, which is to sell it to you.

People assume the point of hiring a property finder is that I find you a house faster. The speed is the least of it.

What you are really paying for is everything around the house. After one proper conversation, I can usually match a person to a property at a glance, because I know these villages and the life each one offers, which valley holds the morning fog, where the neighbours will adopt you and where they will watch you politely from a distance for a decade.

I know where the town hall paperwork runs smoothly and where it crawls, and the shortcuts when a document that officially takes three months is needed rather sooner.

And after more than three decades in construction, I can stand in front of a house and tell you what that crack above the window actually means, whether the barn can honestly become a guest cottage, and roughly what the works will cost. That is the difference between buying a house and buying the right house.

Sometimes my honest opinion is to walk away.

That is the whole point of having someone on your side. Nobody selling you something will ever say it.

So that service you have been watching on Channel 4 all these years exists here in Portugal, and it is not reserved for the wealthy or the investors.

It is for anyone who would rather not gamble their retirement fund on a sunny afternoon and a charming agent. If you want to talk about what that looks like for your own search, I'm just a call away.

JP