How to Find a Property Deal Without Paying a Sourcer

A property sourcer finds a deal, packages it, and charges you a fee — commonly quoted somewhere between £3,000 and £5,000, though it varies and some charge a percentage instead. On a £150,000 property that is two to three percent of the purchase price, paid on top of your deposit, stamp duty, legal fees and survey.

Sometimes that is money well spent. Often it is paid for research you could have done yourself, because most of what goes into a sourcing pack comes from public registers that are free to anyone who knows where to look. This is what the fee buys, broken into the parts you can do and the part you probably cannot.

What is actually in a sourcing pack

Strip the branding off and most packs contain the same five things: the property and its asking price, an estimate of what it is worth, an estimate of what it would rent for, a refurbishment budget, and the resulting yield and cash flow figures. Some add photographs and a floor plan.

Four of those five are derived from data anyone can reach. The fifth — the refurbishment budget — is the one that needs somebody to have stood in the building.

The parts you can do yourself

1. Finding the stock

The majority of “sourced” properties are openly listed. Before paying for access to something, check whether it is already on a portal — searching the address or the postcode usually settles it in under a minute. A property you can find yourself is not one you need introducing to.

The genuinely off-market end of the business — probate, repossessions, landlords selling quietly — is real, and it is the part of a sourcer’s job that is hard to replicate. But you should know which of the two you are being sold.

2. Working out what it is worth

This is the check that matters most and the one most often skipped. An asking price is an opinion held by somebody with an interest in it being high. A sold price is a record of what a real buyer paid.

HM Land Registry publishes the sold price of every property in England and Wales, free. Look up the street and the surrounding roads, filter to the last eighteen months or so, and compare like with like — a three-bed terrace against other three-bed terraces, not against the semi with the extension. Our sold prices tool queries the same register directly.

If a pack tells you a property is worth £20,000 more than the asking price, ask which sales that is based on, then look those sales up yourself. A valuation nobody will show you the workings for is not a valuation.

3. Running the numbers

Yield, cash flow, stamp duty and the effect of a rate rise are all arithmetic. They take minutes with a calculator and they are the figures a pack is most likely to present flatteringly — gross yield rather than net, for instance, which ignores every cost of actually running the property.

Run them yourself: rental yield, stamp duty, monthly cash flow, and the deal analyser for the whole picture at once. If your figures and the pack’s figures disagree, the difference is worth understanding before you go further.

4. Checking what the property carries

Conservation areas, listed status and other planning constraints change what you can do to a building and what it costs to do anything at all. These sit on public registers. The local authority’s planning portal will also show what has previously been applied for at the address, which occasionally tells you something the listing does not.

A method you can follow in an afternoon

Vault a property does most of that in one pass — it pulls the sold evidence, runs the calculations, and shows the source of every figure alongside it, including the checks it could not complete. It is free and needs no account.

Where a sourcer genuinely earns the fee

Three things are hard to replicate from a laptop.

• Being there. A refurbishment estimate made from photographs is a guess. Damp, structural movement, a roof at the end of its life and a rewire that cannot wait are all things somebody has to see.
• Relationships. An agent who calls one person before a property is listed is worth something real, and it takes years to become that person.
• Distance. If you are investing in a city you cannot easily get to, or from abroad, you are paying somebody to be present. That is a legitimate service.

What is harder to justify is a fee for assembling public data on an openly listed property into a document. That is the version worth recognising.

Questions worth asking before you pay

• Is this property listed publicly anywhere? If so, where?
• Which specific sold comparables is the valuation based on?
• Have you been inside, and when?
• What exactly does the fee cover, and at what point does it become payable?
• Is the fee refundable if the survey or the searches change the picture?
• What professional registrations and redress arrangements do you have?

Verify the answers independently rather than taking them on trust. A sourcer worth paying will expect you to, and will have no difficulty with any of it.

The point

None of this says never use a sourcer. It says know which half of the fee you are paying for. If the deal is on a portal and the pack is public data in a nice typeface, you have paid several thousand pounds for an afternoon of your own time. If somebody has stood in a building you cannot get to and told you honestly what it needs, that is a different transaction entirely.

Either way, do the sold-price check yourself. It is free, it takes ten minutes, and it is the one number that decides whether everything else in the pack is worth reading.