Top Ten London Buying

‘A few people claim to be the oldest buying agent,’ says Roarie Scarisbrick, ‘but Property Vision genuinely invented the concept.’ When Scarisbrick started out at Property Vision back in 2003, he was simply given the keys to a scooter and told to get on with it. He has since worked his way through the ranks and now personally advises on just under £100 million-worth of acquisitions.

Last year was a ‘strange one’, he says. ‘The higher end of the central London market has had all sorts of issues – it’s been the perfect storm.’ And if the year was a storm, stamp duty was the eye. High rates, says Scarisbrick, are stagnating the market on both the buyer and seller side.

They also mean that the availability of quality property suffers. ‘Supply fell off massively from 2016 to last year, which is making our job very difficult,’ Scarisbrick observes. He is quick to qualify, however, that lack of supply also justifies the existence of property agents: ‘We’re just having to be a little more ingenious about how we go about things.’

Scarisbrick is confident that the storm will eventually pass, however. Indeed, the process has already started. ‘In the second half of 2019 we started to feel a little bit of momentum, and that was reflected in transactions,’ he says.