How to find property that is not on the portals

The answer, straight away

Unpublished property is reached through people, not through websites. Four routes: a local agent with direct owner relationships, a buyer agent who works for you and canvasses several agencies, private networks where agents share requirements without publishing them, and direct approaches to owners of property you want even though it is not for sale.

None is instant. And the first thing you need is not a list of houses: it is a precise description of what you are looking for.

First route: the local agent

In a defined area, somebody who has worked there for years knows what is moving before it moves.

The limit is coverage: they know their patch extremely well and little beyond it.

Second route: the buyer agent

They work for you rather than the seller, and their job is to canvass every agency in the area and hold the search together.

The limit is that they have to be paid, and chosen well.

Third route: private networks between agents

An agent inside a network can circulate your requirement anonymously and find out whether a colleague holds something compatible.

The limit is that you have to go through an agent. Professional networks are not open to the public, and the ones that are usually hold nothing real.

Fourth route: people who are not selling

You identify the properties you want and ask, through a professional, whether the owner would sell. It works more often than people expect.

It takes time and tact: a badly written letter closes a door for years.

What does not work

Sites promising lists of off-market property to anybody who signs up. If it is visible to everyone who leaves an email address, by definition it is not confidential.

Almost always these are properties already published elsewhere, or vague availability with no instruction behind it.

The six headings that make a search work

The real budget, including what you would stretch to. The area, at neighbourhood or hamlet level. The two or three things you would not buy without. The things that look like requirements and are preferences. Your timing. And why you are buying.

The last one is what lets a good agent suggest the property you had not considered.

A case

A buyer who already owned more than ten properties was about to buy the wrong one. Through an agent who knew the area and had understood the real criterion, he reached a property published nowhere.

It was not hidden. Without somebody who had understood what he was looking for, no search would have surfaced it.