The order every purchase has to follow, including my own
People sometimes assume a buyers agent has a separate, better path to property than their clients do. In my case, the opposite is closer to the truth.
I recently bought a property in a market I rate highly. Before I did anything with it for myself, I ran it through the identical process I run for every client. My own brief was logged the way any client's would be, under my partner's profile rather than my own, so it could be assessed on its merits without anyone weighting it because it was mine.
We always aim to have a backup match for every deal, prioritising whoever has been searching longest with the closest fit to the brief. This property matched both my brief and an existing client's. They'd been searching longer, so it went to them first.
They passed. In their view, the property needed too much work in the medium term, and the under-market rent was part of what put them off.
Only once that had happened did my own brief get assessed. That's the order it should follow, mine last, not first.
The numbers stacked up, including the same medium-term work and the same under-market rent the client had walked away from, since I actively look for that combination for the value it can add at entry and also by the time I exit. So I bought it.
The property was off-market, which is often the detail people fixate on when they ask how a buyers agent finds better deals. The access wasn't the interesting part. The order of operations was.