If you’ve already binged “Selling Sunset” and “Selling the OC,” you can keep calm and carry on watching Netflix’s next foray into real estate reality TV, “Buying London.”
The United Kingdom–based series, premiering on Wednesday, stars real estate adviser Daniel Daggers and a team of agents from his DDRE Global real estate firm.
Over the course of his career, Daggers has racked up more than $5.5 billion in home sales in the U.K.’s luxury real estate market, which is referred to as the “super prime market” across the pond.
“It’s been a marketplace that I’m an expert in and have been for over 15 years now, so I called myself Mr. Super Prime,” Daggers tells Realtor.com®.
Eager to get to know Mr. Super Prime, we got Daggers to spill the tea on how he got started in the industry, the biggest sale he’s ever closed, and what his own London home is like. Plus, he breaks down the differences between the U.K. and U.S. housing markets. So take note of his advice for any buyer or seller looking to land a deal stateside or abroad.
How did you first get into real estate and eventually start your luxury real estate business, DDRE Global?
I fell over and I broke my collarbone wanting to be a professional footballer—I mean football as in soccer. I didn’t succeed at university. I didn’t do well there at all. I fell into real estate literally when I was 17, and I worked for 10 years in a small company in the window as a spotty teenager. Then I went to a big firm and scaled that big, corporate business.
[I] spent a lot of time in the U.S. [I] love the way real estate agents or brokers in the U.S. attack business. I think they’re super passionate, super driven, and they’re much more focused on service than we are here in the U.K.
I was really inspired, traveled the world, and then set up DDRE from my kitchen table in lockdown. You couldn’t have timed this worse in theory, but everything happens for a reason.
I’ve got a lot of clients who were traveling at the time, and they needed to rent a house with a garden, or they needed to move, and often they relied on me to make decisions.
Were you inspired by any U.S. agents we would recognize?
I know a lot of the top brokers there. So, for instance, I know personally Ryan Serhant, Fredrik Eklund, Josh Altman, [and] Noble Black. I spent years of my life traveling to the U.S. building great relationships with these top brokers because our world is getting much smaller, and we all have crossover at the top end of the market. So having really meaningful relationships with other brokers is very important for anyone’s career.
What makes ‘Buying London’ unique as a reality show?
Well, we’re British, right? So we’re going to do it very differently. You’re going to hear wonderful accents and see incredible real estate. I think people will see the language is slightly different, [and] the homes are typically very British, which is quite nice.
We are more reserved; we are more subtle. But, just like everybody, we’ve all got different sides of our characters, and sometimes we can be feisty. I just think people get mystified by our accents. As someone who’s done a lot of business in the U.S., I know that it does work wonders. Aren’t we lucky?
How does real estate in the U.K. differ from the U.S.?
There [are] a lot of nuances here. We have leasehold [property], freehold [property]—loads of different things that you don’t necessarily have in the U.S. that complicates a transaction and affects values.
Here in the U.K., you’ve got this thing called stamp duty, which is a significant burden. It’s a cost that you pay when you buy a property, which means you’re not flipping when you buy real estate here because it would be very expensive.
There’s three words we use in our industry. There’s broker, estate agent, and adviser.
An adviser is someone who is there when you need them to execute a transaction. They are there to give you advice in relation to real estate as a whole: What should your next purchase be? Where should it be? When should you do it? Have you financed it?
An adviser is someone you lean on for advice before you go…
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