Daniel Daggers is aware that London estate agents currently don’t have the best reputation. Less Selling Sunset, more Stath Lets Flats. Geezers, not glam. But he hopes Buying London, a new Netflix series showcasing the lives and listings of the super-prime property agents at DDRE Global, could change that.
“I think that the world lacks empathy for real estate agents because the real estate agents haven’t focused on giving a good service,” says Daggers. “Or explaining what they really do.”
What DDRE Global does is buy and sell super-expensive homes to the super-rich, often with the help of social media. Buying London is the British answer to Selling Sunset, the LA-based sun-soaked property-slash-reality-tv-show. Selling Sunset’s seventh season racked up 4.7 million views, making it Netflix’s second most-watched show globally.
Daggers presides over an office of well-coiffed brokers seeking to dispel stereotypes of estate agents as greasy sharks. Having started in property straight out of school, Daggers, now 44, worked for years for Knight Frank before parting ways (the reasons for which are covered by a strict NDA) and striking out on his own. He had a star turn on L’Agence, the Parisian Selling Sunset. Now he has his own show, premised on opening a window into the shiny homes of the super wealthy.
“Netflix came to me,” he says. “Which people are a little shocked by.”
“The world lacks empathy for real estate agents because the real estate agents haven’t focused on giving a good service.”
Daggers has come a long way from showing Londoners around £300,000 flats as a “spotty” 17-year-old in the late Nineties. “My clients are top-tier individuals that are running FTSE 500 businesses, there are entrepreneurs with net worths in the tens of billions,” he says. “I have royal family members from the Middle East as clients, too.”
Is there still high demand in the capital? London’s super-prime market has been buffeted by the UK’s economic and political uncertainty, with UHNWIs (Ultra High Net Worth Individuals) getting skittish about looming tax changes. The recent changes to non-dom tax status haven’t helped — so DDRE Global also sells property in cities like Dubai for the super-rich looking for more favourable tax conditions.
Daggers would never be as gauche (or risk breaking an NDA) as to name names, but he has noticed his clientele has shifted from older generational wealth to much younger self-styled, self-made millionaires, some only in their mid-twenties.
With changing times come changing tastes, and DDRE Global’s agents must cater to the shifting desires of the super-rich. “I rarely meet a panic room. Panic rooms are over-hyped,” he says, quashing the idea that all billionaires are paranoid recluses holed up in their basement extensions.
“I rarely meet a panic room. Panic rooms are over-hyped.”
Young rich people, apparently, want to be close to cool expensive gyms with memberships that will filter for other young rich people they can meet. Padel, Europe’s answer to pickleball, is a big deal. “We had a buyer looking to acquire one of the houses we were marketing and they asked someone to measure out the garden to see if they could put a padel court in,” Daggers says. “They couldn’t, so they didn’t buy the house.”
At-home wellness centres are also a big draw; not every millionaire wants to be sweating it out alongside their fellow UHNWIs. “I’ve got clients that don’t want to share the facilities. If they buy an apartment, they’ll buy the studio flat next door and fit it out with all their health and wellbeing machines,” he says. Machines doesn’t mean running or cycling, necessarily.
“Young tech entrepreneurs in particular are very conscious about their health,” he says. “They sit at their computer, they grind it out, then they eat supplements and use machines to elongate their lives.” Cryotherapy chambers, for one, feature in Buying London, although his phrasing does also suggest tech billionaires doing weird things with blood injections.
But even for the very rich, buying and selling a home is a supremely stressful experience, Daggers assures me. Agents need to see themselves more as therapists rather than salespeople, gently guiding their clients through the trials and tribulations of the process. “Just ‘cos you’re wealthy doesn’t give you no stress,” he says. “You’ll find that when you’re successful, you have other stresses.”
Daggers doesn’t want to lose sight of his humble beginnings. He may be procuring multi-million-pound homes for UHNWIs but he’s still the boy who grew up in local authority housing, got bullied at school, then found a job with an estate agency at 17 after his football career hopes were dashed.
“Just ‘cos you’re wealthy doesn’t give you no stress.”
But he is worried that the UK education system isn’t adequately preparing young people for service-orientated careers such as property. “I wasn’t taught to be an agent, I had to learn on the job,” says Daggers. “I don’t think that’s good enough, we need to give people the tools to be successful first.”
To plug this gap, Daggers has set up an online academy for young people to learn the soft skills required to make comfortable people from every background. Negotiation, the art of showing a property, and how to “know what people really mean when they say stuff” is all on the curriculum.
Daggers is as passionate about London as he is about property and people. He hopes the show will draw positive attention to his beloved home that is still, he insists, the place where everyone wants to be — and buy a home. “We’re an amazing city, so why don’t we show it off?” he wonders. “No one has shone a positive light in London for many years. It’s like a secret.”
Buying London’s soaring drone shots B-roll showing off the city’s glitziest addresses could prompt people to book their flights here, he suggests. “I think London needs a refresh, and this could be the catalyst,” says Daggers. “The Mayor should be here knocking on our door saying, ‘Thank you, DDRE Global, for putting London on the map again’.”
Has London really dropped off the map to begin with? A recent report from Knight Frank, Daggers’s former employers, ranked it a paltry 95th place out of 107 on their Global Residential Cities Index — but that’s in part because it’s so incredibly expensive to buy here.
“Self-belief is very important for anybody. But particularly if you’re going to go on to Netflix.”
The show is already ruffling feathers among the traditional city agencies. DDRE are the upstarts in an industry awash with heritage brands around for up to a century. “We’re the sixth most influential real estate business across the UK at market and selling homes over £5 million. We did that in three and a half years,” Daggers beams.
He and his team are a coterie of competitive, dramatic, blow-dried and sharp-elbowed glamazons — men included, although the women outnumber them (something very rare in the male-dominated world of property). But, having previewed the episodes, they are also very human, with all the emotions and messiness that brings. Are they prepared for the potential fame a Netflix show could entail?
“Self-belief is very important for anybody,” says Daggers. “But particularly if you’re going to go on to Netflix and be part of a show that’s going to be seen in 88 countries all over the world.” He doesn’t want to draw a boundary between who he is in real life versus on-camera. “What you see is what you get.”
Now it’s time to find out what the audience sees.
