Your client wants to sell discreetly: what you can do

The answer, straight away

You can do three things: understand what the client actually needs, introduce them to a qualified professional, and stay in your own role while the transaction runs. What you cannot do, without the prescribed qualifications, is run the negotiation and position yourself as intermediary between the parties.

The distinction is not formal: it changes your position, and the consequences fall on you.

First: understand what is needed

A client saying they want to sell is often saying something else. They want liquidity by a certain date. They want to end a co-ownership. They want something not to become known.

The real need changes the strategy, and you are best placed to know it, because you keep their accounts or handled the succession.

Second: choose who to introduce them to

Not the best-known name: the one suited to that kind of property and that band.

Three useful questions: how many deals they have completed in this band in two years, how many matching buyers they hold now, and how they will reach the ones they do not.

Third: protect the client in the introduction

Put in writing what you are doing. One line saying you are introducing the client and that the agent runs the transaction.

Ask that the client is told everything that gets shared, and that the property is not published without written authorisation.

On the fee, beforehand and in writing

If there is any recognition for the introduction, it is agreed beforehand, in writing, and the treatment is checked.

That treatment differs depending on whether the activity is occasional or continuous and on your own professional position. Some professions have their own incompatibility rules, which are looked at beforehand rather than afterwards.

This article orients you and does not replace advice: the assessment belongs to the specific case, with somebody qualified.

What not to do

Do not run the price negotiation. Do not present yourself to the owner as the person handling the sale. Do not let your name appear as the reference for the transaction.

Three things done out of helpfulness that move you into a role that is not yours.

Why it is worth doing anyway

Because the client remembers who put them in good hands at a delicate moment.

The value to you is not the introduction. It is that a badly handled sale, of assets you look after, becomes your problem regardless.