Why I’ll Always Pay Someone Who Knows More Than Me

I have learnt that often the best decision you can make is to hire people who are better at things than you are. My money is managed by professionals, because the cost of getting that wrong compounds. My children see a specialist paediatric GP, rather than a general one, who i really trust. When I built Lucie Hirst Private Clients from scratch, I hired Knot to build the brand and the website, because I am not a marketer and pretending otherwise would have been a disaster. I use Quartz to extend my brand’s reach, because visibility is a skill like any other and they are the best at what they do. And my accountant, who specialises in entrepreneurial businesses, has saved me more than I have ever paid him.

In every case the logic is the same: find a professional with experience and ideally via a trusted referral. Then delegate and trust them completely.

And when my clients are making, what is often, the most significant purchase of their lives, they apply exactly the same logic.

There is a question I have been asked more times than I can count, by potential clients, about thirty minutes into a conversation in which they have described, in some detail, everything that has already gone wrong in their property journey.

Do I really need a buying agent?

I usually respond with a different question: when was the last time something really mattered, and you decided to figure it out alone?

You wouldn’t. Not really. Not when the stakes are high enough. You don’t perform your own surgery. You don’t draft your own contracts (or use AI - yet) when something significant is on the line. You don’t design your own building and hope the structural calculations are roughly right. At a certain level of complexity, and a certain level of consequence, every intelligent person reaches for someone who has done this before. Not because they couldn’t learn but because learning on something that matters is a cost nobody should pay.

Property is no different. Except that people often behave as though it is.

The London property market alone should be enough to give anyone pause. Off-market stock currently outweighs publicly listed homes by as much as 5:1 across prime central London, as more sellers test pricing and buyer appetite away from the portals. Which means that if you are searching alone, on the portals like rightmove.com, with no relationships and no access, you are looking at roughly one fifth of what actually exists. You are not searching the market. You are searching a curated selection of what the market didn’t sell privately first.

But access is only the beginning of it.

What I do for my clients is not simply find property. I assemble the right team around every single purchase, because the search and acquisition itself is only one part inside a much larger set of decisions, and each of those decisions requires its own expertise.

The surveyor I use in the Cotswolds is not the surveyor I use in Chelsea. They are not interchangeable. One knows every road, every microclimate and the planning history for ten miles. The other has spent twenty years understanding the specific structural quirks of a particular kind of London townhouse. The architect I bring in when a client wants to reconfigure is not the same as the planning consultant I call when the local authority is likely to be difficult. And in a recent purchase for a Middle Eastern client, finding the right lawyer meant finding one who understood Sharia-compliant law, because the financing structure required it and the wrong appointment would have unwound the entire transaction.

None of that knowledge is available on a portal.

I have encouraged clients to walk away from properties that looked, on paper, perfect. A house in the Cotswolds: fifty acres, no footpaths, complete privacy, exactly what my client had spent two years looking for. We walked away because a neighbour held sporting rights over the land, meaning they were legally entitled to enter the property to collect shot game. My client’s entire reason for buying was privacy. That single clause would have made the purchase worthless to him. It was not in the brochure, it was in the title. For other clients where this may not have been a deal breaker I would have used this technicality in negotiations to reduce the price we paid for the property.

In London, the issues are different but no less consequential. A restrictive covenant that prevents the extension my client was counting on. A flying freehold, where part of the property sits over a neighbouring building, creating shared structural responsibility and complicating both insurance and any future sale. These are not obscure technicalities. They are material facts that affect value, liveability, and resale, and they require someone who has seen them before to know to look for them before a penny goes to lawyers.

Then the question of fees comes up, and I understand why it is often challenged. A buying agent represents a cost that is visible, upfront, and easy to weigh against nothing. What is harder to weigh is the cost of the wrong purchase: the title issue that surfaces six months in, the surveyor who didn’t know the road, the lawyer who wasn’t right for the transaction, the offer made at the wrong moment on a property that had been sitting for a reason or simple the time spend searching that caused delays and consequences in other parts of people lives.

The most expensive expertise is always the kind you realise you needed too late.

I am always happy to talk through individual circumstances directly and in the strictest confidence. Please reach out if you want to discuss how it all works.