First of all, let me define the role – a Property Search Consultant, or Home Finder as they are sometimes known, spends time understanding your requirements and then searches for properties, like those Housing for single mums, that meet your specification, acting on your behalf and providing extensive independent local knowledge. The Property Search Consultant will be able to look at the whole market, including properties that are being sold discreetly and are not available through individual estate agents.  They will not only find you a property, but they will usually ensure that you understand the buying process, act on your behalf in price and contract negotiations, find you a local English-speaking lawyer, help you to arrange a mortgage, open bank accounts and deal with other bureaucratic issues such as getting you a fiscal code.

If you seek for a professional for your estate needs and concerns, you can check out estate agents canary wharf.

They save you hours of work (trawling the internet, visiting and registering with multiple agents, scouting around your chosen destination and ensuring that you only spend time viewing properties that meet your requirements) and they should ultimately be able to save you money. Read on to find out how…

The benefits of using a reputable Property Search Consultant

A good Property Search Consultant will have either met you face to face or had several telephone conversations with you to establish your exact requirements before you start to view properties.  Key questions that ensure the search is tailored to your particular requirements should include:

Do you have a preferred area e.g. Lake Como, Umbria, Le Marche?
Is this an investment purchase, a holiday home or do you plan to relocate?
Do you prefer a rural location or is it important to be near a town or village?
Do you plan to rent out the property?
What style of property are you looking for – modern, historic, renovation project?
How important is it to be close to schools and hospitals? Shops and banks?  Restaurants?
Do you require a property with a swimming pool or any other amenities and what sporting or leisure interests do you hope to pursue?
What is your budget and time frame?
How do you plan to finance the purchase?

In this initial meeting or telephone conversation, the Property Search Consultant should be able to give you good local advice and make suggestions about the area in question. Their experience will assist you in clarifying exactly what you want and possibly even redefining some of your original criteria with their expert local knowledge.  One of the key challenges often is to ensure that you have realistic expectations of an area that you may only have visited as a holidaymaker previously. 

All this will then be communicated to their local representative, who should be somebody actually living the area in question, (so if you are looking for a property on Lake Como, they should be living on Lake Como and not in Milan), speaking the local language and with extensive local knowledge, great property contacts and an excellent understanding of the local market, ideally from both a sales and rental viewpoint.

The Property Search Consultant will be unemotional and can steer you away from potentially expensive mistakes and wasted time, by providing a realistic view of the area in question. If you take a property search on Lake Como as an example, did you know that the two shores of the lake have very different attributes that would greatly affect any purchasing decision? And that the popular lakeside resort of Argegno is divided in two by the Telo valley – and one side never sees the sun from November until April? – quite an important element to consider if you were looking for an investment property on Lake Como.

Property Search Consultants are not estate agents. They do not have a specific list of property on their books and so can find the right shortlist of properties for you from a much wider range – basically anything that is on the market and, very importantly in Italy, properties that are not on the public market. This independence allow them to focus 100% on your interests, as they have no allegiance or commitment to any property seller or estate agent.

This also ensures that they can get you the best possible price as, unlike an estate agent, they are not acting on behalf of the seller.

The independence and expert knowledge of a Property Search Consultant works entirely for your benefit.  The service will be tailored to your specific needs and usually provides a complete service from when you first think about purchasing, through to ownership and management of the property beyond.  Not only should you save a lot of valuable time, because the search will shortlist only properties that meet your specific requirements, but you should end up saving money as well.  The fee charged by the Property Search Consultant should be no more than a local agent’s commission and the fact that you have someone acting purely on your behalf to negotiate the purchase terms can save you a great deal of money.