Sourcing is the business of finding property deals and selling the introduction: identifying an opportunity, packaging the evidence, and charging an investor a fee for it. Tens of thousands of UK investors buy sourced deals every year, the model ranges from genuinely professional to outright dangerous, and understanding how it works — and how it is regulated — protects investors on both sides of the fee. It is also the strategy whose mechanics this site's readers most often ask about, because Elaman's research sits adjacent to it while deliberately not being it.
How sourcing works, step by step
- Origination: the sourcer finds opportunities — portal screening, direct-to-vendor marketing, agent relationships, auctions — looking for the discount or angle an ordinary buyer misses.
- Packaging: the deal is written up with the figures (price, comparables, expected rent or resale, refurb estimate, projected returns) and offered to the sourcer's investor list.
- The fee: typically £2,000–£6,000 per deal or about 1–2% of purchase price, paid on reservation or exchange; full-service packagers managing refurb and tenanting charge more.
- Progression: the compliant version of the trade involves terms of business, AML checks on the buyer, and honest progression of the purchase through the investor's own solicitor.
The economics
Sourcing is a service business with service-business economics: revenue per deal in the low thousands, costs dominated by origination time and compliance overhead, and the scarce asset being a reputation for figures that survive the buyer's survey. A sourcer closing three deals a month at £3,500 grosses £126,000 a year — before marketing, subscriptions, insurance, AML supervision fees, and the months a direct-to-vendor pipeline takes to warm up. The recurring economic failure is volume pressure: a sourcer short of deals starts shipping marginal ones, and the reputation that took years to build prices itself out of the next fee.
Regulation
Sourcing is estate agency work under the Estate Agents Act 1979, which makes the compliance stack non-optional: HMRC anti-money-laundering registration (an unregistered sourcer is trading illegally, and HMRC has issued five-figure penalties), an approved redress scheme (TPO or PRS), ICO registration, and professional indemnity insurance. Investors should treat the absence of any of the four as disqualifying, and sourcers should expect to be checked against the public registers.
Sourcing versus information-only research
Elaman Homes is frequently described as a sourcing business; it is not, and the difference is structural rather than cosmetic. A sourcing agent acts in transactions — introduces a specific buyer, negotiates, often holds reservation money, and earns a fee contingent on a deal. Elaman Group Ltd publishes research: scored deals with comparable evidence, documented methodology, and modelling assumptions, available to subscribers on identical terms. We do not act for either side, hold no client money, take nothing from vendors, and progress no transactions — every investor contracts directly with the vendor. That is why packs read like underwriting documents rather than sales material: the research is the entire product.
Where Elaman packs fit
For investors comparing a sourced deal against published research, the pack shows what evidence-led packaging looks like: Land Registry comparables, dated assumptions, distress signals, scored exit strategies, and financing considerations. Investors use it as a benchmark, a second opinion, or a deal source in its own right — with the decision, the due diligence, and the purchase always their own.