The Growing Imbalance in London’s Property Market

For many years, finding the property you want to buy in Prime Central London was a relatively simple and straightforward task. Serious buyers would build relationships with a handful of established firms such as Savills, Knight Frank, and a few respected independents, and through those channels they could see most of the market. It was not perfect, but it worked. Properties for sale were shared more openly online, agents operated within larger structures, and buyers stood a genuine chance of seeing the best opportunities from their laptop without needing a spreadsheet of 300 mobile numbers.

Today, the market looks very different. Many of the industry’s top agents have left traditional agencies and moved into broker style setups, either independently or within smaller private networks built around personal relationships. As a result, a growing number of properties are quietly circulated between brokers rather than being openly launched online or conveniently emailed direclty to you.

For sellers, this can work brilliantly. There is privacy, exclusivity, and often a sense of scarcity that helps create demand. Nobody minds feeling like they own something special, especially in London property. However, for any buyer entering the market, the process has become incredibly inefficient, as the market is more fragmented, private, and at times, frankly exhausting. It is no longer enough to call a few major agencies and expect to understand what is genuinely available. Buyers are now expected to somehow identify dozens, sometimes hundreds, of individual brokers across London, many holding private stock and only sharing opportunities within trusted circles. That is where the frustration starts.

This growing imbalance may also be affecting the wider market itself. When buyers cannot efficiently access available stock, and many are navigating the market without representation, transaction levels are likely to suffer. Deals that might otherwise happen simply never materialise because the right buyer and seller fail to connect. In any healthy property market, liquidity and confidence go hand in hand. If buyers feel they are only seeing a fraction of what is genuinely available, confidence begins to weaken. Many become frustrated by the lack of transparency and step back altogether, uncertain whether they are making fully informed decisions. Over time, this creates a slower, less efficient market where momentum declines and trust gradually erodes.

London is becoming more like the United States, where broker driven markets have existed for years, but without one very important piece of the puzzle, proper buyer representation as standard. In more mature broker markets, buyers usually have their own dedicated representative whose job is to uncover opportunities, manage relationships, and make sure their client sees everything that is available, both in the open and private markets. London, however, is drifting towards a broker led selling market without fully embracing buying representation. The result is a system that increasingly favours sellers and well connected insiders, while ordinary buyers are left trying to get out of this murky maze on their own.

This is precisely why buying agents have and will continue to become increasingly important in Prime London. A well connected buying agent can bridge the gap that now exists between buyers and the new broker market. Rather than spending months attempting to locate the right people, decipher who has moved where, and determine which brokers control which listings, buyers can work with someone already embedded within those networks. It is common knowledge in the industry that many of the best opportunities never reach the portals, they are discussed quietly between brokers, circulated privately before launch, or sold discreetly without ever appearing publicly online. Access to those properties depends entirely on relationships, reputation, and how connected you are in the market. For buyers entering the London market today, the challenge is no longer simply identifying the right property, the challenge is gaining access to the full market itself. Without strong connections across the entire broker community, buyers are missing out on exceptional opportunities simply because they never knew the properties existed.

As London continues evolving towards this broker led structure, the role of the buying agent is no longer a luxury reserved for a small number of wealthy individuals. Increasingly, it is becoming a necessity. In a market where information is lacking and access is everything, having someone who already knows the key selling agents and understands where the best stock is being held, it can unlock all the opportunities and provide buyers with a genuine competitive advantage.

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• Author Jack Osmond
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