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 property matching the brief. This property matched both my brief and an existing client's. They'd been searching longer, so they were first in line.
They passed. It wasn't the right fit for where they were at.
That put me next in line, the same as it would for anyone else in that position.
The numbers stacked up. The property needed some medium-term work and was under market on rent, and I actively look for that combination, for the value it can add at entry and again 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.
The trade-off here is patience, not advantage. Treating myself as a client at the back of a real queue means sometimes waiting on a deal I could see suited me, without knowing whether I'd get the chance to act on it at all.