The (super) prime property market is built on relationships and insider knowledge – connecting the right buyers with the right properties at the perfect moment. In a sector where exclusivity and timing are everything, high-net-worth individuals often turn to top-tier buying agents to streamline the process, saving valuable time and effort while ensuring access to the finest opportunities.
The best prime property buying agents begin by understanding a client’s specific objectives, whether that means securing a trophy home, a discreet off-market gem or a strategic investment.
Using their extensive experience and network, they search and assess most suitable options – many of which never even reach the open market. Buying agents don’t just facilitate transactions; they provide strategic counsel, ensuring their clients make informed and advantageous decisions.
Explore the other rankings within the 2025 Spear’s Property Indices:
- Best property brokers
- Best country specialists
- Best property lawyers
- Best removals and shipping specialists
- Best property investment, finance, management & private office services
What sets the best apart is their unparalleled access: a meticulously maintained black book of contacts, including private sellers and industry insiders, allowing them to source properties that might otherwise remain unseen.
Of course, discretion is paramount in this exclusive world, and as with all experts featured in the Spear’s Property Indices 2025, top buying agents act as trusted advisers, always protecting their clients’ interests while maintaining the highest levels of confidentiality.
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Methodology
Each year, the Spear’s Research Unit reassesses and refreshes its rankings of the leading providers in each sector by gathering data from and about the advisers and firms themselves, assessing submission forms, collating nominations, carrying out peer reviews, reviewing data from third-party sources, gathering references and recommendations, canvassing experts and conducting hundreds of interviews.
Advisers are evaluated using a proprietary scoring system that assigns different weightings to certain attributes. These scores feed directly into each new set of rankings in the Spear’s Indices. Each of these indices are published first online (according to the research calendar) and then in print. Print publication takes the form of the annual Spear’s 500 directory, which includes the top advisers in every index.
[See also: A guide to The Spear’s 500: Everything you need to know]
Each featured adviser is profiled on spears500.com. The site allows users to search the Spear’s database of more than 4,000 entities to find one (or more) to meet their specific requirements by filtering for specific attributes such as an adviser’s location, their specialist expertise and information about their client base.
Best buying agents: Some of the top names to know
Camilla Dell
- Focus: Off-market transactions in London
- Position: Founder and managing partner, Black Brick
- Ranking: Top Flight
Dell set up Black Brick in 2007 to ‘level up the playing field and ensure that buyers get a fair deal’. Off-market transactions make up more than two-fifths of the properties Dell’s firm sources for clients, and while London’s super-prime postcodes continue to perform ‘very strongly’, Black Brick also serves buyers in the home counties and west country via its country property arm.
‘I just don’t believe you can be a buying agent if you work for an estate agency,’ she says.
Read Camilla Dell’s full profile on Spears500.com
Hannah Aykroyd
- Focus: Off-market properties
- Position: Founder and managing director, Aykroyd & Co
- Ranking: Top Flight
A new addition to this year’s Top Flight rankings, Hannah Aykroyd is the managing director of Aykroyd & Co, the prime central London-focused buying agency that she launched in early 2018. In its inaugural year, the firm completed more than £60 million in transactions.
Aykroyd has won the loyalty of her HNW clients with her attention to detail, discretion and customer care – and by unearthing exceptional off-market opportunities and then ensuring the smooth completion of transactions.
Read Hannah Aykroyd’s full profile on Spears500.com
Harry Dawes
- Focus: Prime residential property
- Position: Founder and director, Dawes London
- Ranking: Recommended
Harry Dawes, the former head of Knight Frank’s flagship Sloane Avenue office, has dealt in prime central London for over 20 years. Inspired by his connection with clients, he founded the buying agency Dawes London in 2021. ‘I always enjoyed acting for buyers,’ Dawes tells Spear’s. ‘I take on half a dozen clients that I can service 365.’
A new edition in this year’s Property Indices, the amiable founder says that many of his transactions are off-market. ‘Discretion is paramount in our dealings,’ he notes.
Read Harry Dawes’s full profile on Spears500.com
Sophie Rogerson
- Focus: Search and acquisitions
- Position: Managing director, RFR
- Ranking: Top Flight
Over the last decade of her career, RFR managing director Sophie Rogerson has advised on some of London’s most sought-after properties with an amiability and flair that has drawn praise from her peers in the industry.
One observer says that she is ‘super bright and combines this with market knowledge as well as emotional intelligence’ while another senior lawyer notes that ‘clients love her’.
Read Sophie Rogerson’s full profile on Spears500.com
Roarie Scarisbrick
- Focus: Super-prime London property
- Position: Partner, Property Vision
- Ranking: Top Flight
Roarie Scarisbrick tells Spear’s that during his first year at Property Vision in 2004, he must have looked at the best part of a thousand properties. Two decades on, the St Andrews art history graduate is a partner at the firm and a seasoned adviser for private clients navigating prestigious postcodes in central London and beyond.
‘We’re not looking to beat people up,’ Scarisbrick, a 2024 Spear’s Award winner, says of the art of the buying agent. ‘We’re just looking for really good property at the right price for the clients.’
Read Roarie Scarisbrick’s full profile on Spears500.com
Best buying agents: the complete list
Contact us
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