Privacy guaranteed

“There are many good reasons to sell a house off-market,” says Henry Sherwood, managing director of The Buying Agents. “We had a guy whose art collection was worth more than his house — he didn’t want to go to the trouble of moving it all so the house could be photographed and buyers shown round.”

Other vendors sell off-market in the hope of getting the highest price possible, trying their luck without fully committing to a sale. “Not-on-the-market properties tend to be optimistically priced, as vendors often have the luxury of not having to sell,” says Christy Bartlett, a buying agent for Stacks Property Search in the southwest. “They often take the view that if a buyer comes along who wants the property badly enough, and is prepared to pay over the odds, then they will consider selling.”

Some vendors sell off-market to avoid leaving what Sherwood calls “a digital footprint” — nobody can see how long the property has been on the market, what it was first listed for or whether the price has been cut.

£90m, London W1. Vivian Imerman, of Del Monte fame, sold this seven-bedroom home on Upper Brook Street

As for buyers, the appeal of purchasing a property off-market is often down to “wanting something that no one else can have”, says Alex Bourne, director of Hanover Residential, a boutique estate agency in west London.

Whether buying or selling, privacy is key — agents who sell off-market are often required to sign non-disclosure agreements. To find a buyer, they make discreet inquiries within their network of wealth managers, financial advisers and buying agents to establish which high-net-worth individuals might be looking for a property.

“Truly off-market deals are the ones the PR people aren’t even briefed on,” says Peter Wetherell, a Mayfair estate agent who has sold properties this way for sums between £8.5m and £62m. “Then I know there is no danger of the information getting out there in the media. No PDF brochures are sent out. There is password-controlled access to websites. All brochures are numbered on the inside cover, and a record of them is kept for the client, with any remaining ones shredded.”

Despite all the precautions, word sometimes leaks out. In May, it emerged that the Qatari royal family had purchased a grade II listed house on Mount Street, in Mayfair, for £40m through Wetherells. And last month Vivian Imerman, former chief executive of the Del Monte fruit company, sold a seven-bedroom Regency home on nearby Upper Brook Street for £90m, in a deal brokered by Savills estate agency. Wetherell would not comment on the Mount Street story, but estimates that up to a third of his properties are sold “under the counter”. He blames the internet, which lets people snoop around homes on property portals, for the trend.

The practice is not confined to the glittering world of prime central London: it is spreading to the country, where privacy is also jealously guarded. “If the sellers are a traditional family who have been in their home for generations, then they are often embarrassed to be the generation having to sell,” says Mark Lawson, a partner at The Buying Solution. “A private sale enables them to use the excuse that they were approached by a buyer making an offer they couldn’t refuse.”

Out in the country, sale prices are not as gasp-inducing as they are in the capital: so far this year, David Froggatt, a director in Jackson-Stops & Staff estate agency’s Chipping Campden branch, has seen off-market sales ranging from £800,000 to £1.5m. Crispin Holborow, director in Savills’ country department, says that just over 30% of country homes marketed by the firm are being offered privately.

Given the number of houses being sold this way, buyers at the top end might feel offended and short-changed if they aren’t offered entry to this rarefied world. Deciding who will be inducted is a delicate business — in Wetherell’s case, he tends to offer these properties to longtime clients or to people who have been recommended.

Sometimes he relies on instinct. “You can just feel that they are serious — the discussion process is really an interview,” he says. Simple questions such as where a buyer might be holidaying this year often have hidden significance: “You can work out if they use a private jet or not.”

Part of the appeal of off-market is the feeling of belonging to an exclusive club. “Some vendors hope to give the impression that their house is rare, special and unobtainable to the masses,” says Roarie Scarisbrick, a partner at the buying agency Property Vision.

Yet it is increasingly being used as a marketing ploy, and thereby losing its cachet. “The term is being abused,” Sherwood says. “If you can create a sense of exclusivity around a property, then you can try to charge a premium for it. But I received an email about a one-bedroom flat in Islington that was billed as being sold ‘off-market’. They’re trying to give it a mystique, but if you send out a mass email, that is not off-market.”

Some say a sale is only truly off-market when a buying agent has a picky client and no suitable properties — in which case they will literally knock on doors. Camilla Dell, managing partner of Black Brick, recently acted for a South African family who were keen to live in Petersham, southwest London. “We knocked on the door of every property on three specific streets they wanted, found a seller and completed an entirely off-market transaction,” recalls Dell, whose clients paid £3.7m for the house last summer.

So is all the cloak-and-dagger stuff worth it — and does the inflated pricing strategy really work? Simon Armitage, sales manager at Druce estate agency in South Kensington, is not convinced. “This method dramatically reduces the pool of possible buyers viewing the property,” he says. “Interested buyers may be working on the other side of the world, relying heavily on online portals to search.

“Although keeping one’s home out of the estate agent’s window may be the most fashionable brag at London dinner parties, it is a counterintuitive move for those serious about selling.”