Who's actually working for you?

The first few minutes went badly. I sat down in the media room at GunnerCooke's Manchester office on the morning of 27 August, two chairs and a small table between us like a talk show, So Yung asking the questions across from me and Hannah Beko behind the camera, and I had never done anything like it before. It showed. We stopped and started more than once before I settled.

gunnercooke's Manchester office.

What got me through was looking at So Yung and treating the room like a coffee shop table, nothing else in it. Once the nerves dropped, the camera and the media team disappeared. It became a conversation, one that ran for two hours, eleven till one, with no script.

One question sat underneath most of the others: why use a sourcing agent instead of going straight to the seller. It is the question I hear from Hong Kong buyers more than any other, and it is worth answering properly here, because the difference decides who is actually working for you.

An estate agent works for the seller. They get paid to push the price up, and that is not a criticism, it is simply the job. A sourcing agent works the other way round, a bespoke service paid by the buyer to find a deal that still stacks once every cost lands on the table, from the survey and legal fees to the refurb. People mix the two up, and the fee structure is the reason why.

Once you know who pays whom, you know who each side is protecting.

That is what bespoke means in my own work too. No two investors I work with want the same thing. One wants a hands-off BTL that runs itself while they get on with their life in Hong Kong. Another wants a flip they can watch move week by week. A third is buying for a daughter starting university and does not want to think about tenants at all. I build the search, the numbers, and the whole process around whichever one of those you are, not around one package I run the same way for everyone.

So Yung and Hannah spent two hours making sure that distinction was clear, because it is exactly the kind of thing that gets glossed over at an exhibition stand. Sourcing agents are not a well-known idea in Hong Kong yet. The buyers who do come across one usually meet them at an exhibition, with little context for why they would use one instead of going straight to a developer or an estate agent. So Yung wanted her clients to hear the difference explained, on camera, before an exhibition stand became the first place they heard the term.

So Yung is well placed to explain it. She is a UK-qualified solicitor at GunnerCooke, working across residential property, commercial real estate, and private client wealth planning, and a STEP candidate, working toward the recognised standard for international trust and estate practice. She advises in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. You can look her up before you finish reading this, along with Hannah, a fellow property lawyer at GunnerCooke who has recorded sessions like this many times before. Neither of them needs to be taken on trust.

That is the whole point of putting two hours of unscripted questions on camera. A sourcing agent who shows you nothing but finished kitchens is asking for trust with no way to earn it. Someone answering the hardest question straight, on the record, working for the buyer rather than the seller, gives you something to check instead.

The rest of the session

So Yung interviewing me in GunnerCooke's Manchester studio.

Past the estate agent question, the recording walks through what a solicitor checks that a sourcing agent cannot, and what changes once inheritance or succession planning enters the picture, which happens often for a family buying to pass down rather than to flip. If you want a sense of what buyer-side means in practice, book a 30-minute call and I will walk you through how it works on a live purchase.

So Yung didn't have to open her network to a sourcing agent she'd only recently met, and she did. We are already planning more of this, further filming and a joint webinar for her Hong Kong network, so two hours in a Manchester media room will not be the last of it.

Check who is working for you

If you are weighing up a UK property purchase from Hong Kong, the first question worth asking anyone you speak to, sourcing agent or estate agent, is who pays them and who they are working for. So Yung and Hannah can tell you exactly where they stand. So can I, with my own company registration and the four registers you can search in ten minutes.

If you want to run through those checks before you commit to anyone, book a 30-minute call and I will go through them with you.

P.S. I nearly froze in that room before I settled into it. So Yung didn't. Two hours of unscripted questions from someone who works for the buyer, not the seller, is on this website because it happened. If you would rather know who is working for you before you send anyone a deposit, book a call and ask me directly.