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Secret Agents: Quiet listings & off-market property deals have soared in the last year
January 2022 - PrimeResi

More than 135,000 homes were sold without ever appearing on a property portal or being publicly advertised in 2021, according to new data, while a quarter of £1m+ sales in London were off-market deals.

There’s been a marked increase in the number of properties being sold without the help of property portals or other open marketing.

Analysis by national estate agency Hamptons reveals that over 135,000 homes were sold without ever appearing on a property portal or being publicly advertised in 2021; it’s the highest figure since records started in 2007, and some 60% more than in the previous two years. It accounts for around 9% of all 2021’s transactions. None of these properties appeared on Rightmove, Zoopla, OnTheMarket etc, or in branch windows, newspaper ads or social media.

The last year saw an even more striking increase in the proportion of deals done before properties were openly marketed. Hamptons’ research indicates that one in five sales last year was agreed “pre-marketing” – where an offer was accepted at least a day before the property was advertised on a portal. This figure only includes homes that did go on to be listed on a portal (i.e. proper off-market sales are excluded).

“We’ve seen more sellers looking at an off-market strategy, in part to avoid being swamped by viewings but also to test pricing”

“Essentially as stock levels have fallen, we’ve seen buyers increasingly look to get into homes before they’ve been formally marketed (i.e photographs taken, floorplans drawn up etc) and agree a deal with the vendor before they’ve been more widely advertised,” explains David Fell, a senior analyst at Hamptons. “Again as stock levels have fallen, we’ve seen more sellers looking at an off-market strategy, in part to avoid being swamped by viewings but also to test pricing, particularly in London.”

“Typically these are homes where the vendor doesn’t want details publicly available, typically for security, privacy or pricing concerns,” adds Fell.

Our recent LonRes survey of buying agents told a similar story of this rise of the off-market deal. Over half the 70 buying agent respondents reported an increase in off-market deals over the past year-or-so.

“Sellers have been trying to push pricing up, without leaving a paper trail on the portals”

“Particularly in sought-after markets outside of London, like the commuter belts, sellers have been trying to push pricing up, without leaving a paper trail on the portals,” says the Hamptons team. “So they’ll test the waters with a high price and if it sells, great, and if they don’t get a deal will then take it to the open market with a slightly more realistic price.”

Higher-value homes are more likely to go the off-market or quiet-marketing route. As the earlier chart shows, a quarter (25%) of £1m+ homes sold in London last year found a buyer without any public advertising or property portal listing. That compares to one in five (20%) across all price ranges in the capital, and fewer than one in ten (9%) across Britain.

Most buying agents claim to do a much higher proportion of “off-market” deals than the averages reported by Hamptons. 42% of Black Brick’s 2021 acquisitions, for example, were off-market, while Hannah Aykroyd told us that her firm, Aykroyd & Co, is “now acquiring c.80% of properties off-market, which is a 15% increase from two years ago, as more vendors are opting to sell discreetly.”

Overall, about 20% of buying agency clients say access to off-market properties is their No.1 reason for employing a buying agent (according to the recent LonRes survey).

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