Meet Buying London’s divisive Daniel Daggers: ‘Mr Super Prime’ says the British version of Selling Sunset is ‘creating loads of business opportunities’, despite the hate

Selling Sunset’s British counterpart, Buying London, is creating quite the buzz and being hailed by The Guardian as the “most hateable TV show ever made”. But according to Netflix Tudum, despite the mixed reviews, Buying London spent one week on Netflix’s global Top 10 TV Shows chart, and appeared on the streaming platform’s Top 10 TV Shows chart in 24 countries, including the UK, Australia and Canada.

Thanks to all this, stars of the reality TV show are revelling in their spike in popularity since the show premiered in May. Daniel Daggers, the self-proclaimed Mr Super Prime for the luxury properties he represents, has been boasting that the show brought in “huge” profits for DDRE Global, the London-based company he founded in 2020. “We’ve got very comfortably over £270 million [US$356.3 million] worth of real estate that’s found its way to us for marketing and sale”, he told Spear’s magazine in June. Daggers also said on This Morning that the show is meant to be viewed as entertainment rather than as a documentary – and when pressed for his reaction to the poor reviews, added, “We’re enjoying it. It’s creating loads of business opportunities for us.”

Here’s what we know about Daniel Daggers, who boasts “royal family members from the Middle East as clients”, and was named Property Adviser of the Year by Spear’s in 2019.

What is Daniel Daggers’ background?

Daniel Daggers’ father, Derrick Daggers, is an Englishman, and his mother, Noga Kapara, is Yemenite and Israeli. Derrick was a kitchen designer when his son was growing up. He is now based near Tel Aviv, where he style himself as a “freelance property consultant”, per British media.

In the 1960s, Derrick Daggers was reportedly in the casino business, as co-owner of Pair of Shoes casino and the Penthouse Club. However, per the same source, both businesses lost their licences over Mafia links.

Daniel Daggers came from humble beginnings

These days, Daggers may be living it up with his girlfriend in the posh London neighbourhood of Little Venice, but the property adviser grew up in a 600 sq ft home in what was then local authority housing in Maida Vale. “There were lots of kids in the high-rises and these flats,” he told British Tatler. “Loads of kids from different races, different backgrounds. That was my life.” He added that it was “a rude awakening, because some kids either didn’t have parents or had one parent. They were dealing drugs, stealing and having a tough life”.

He was once an aspiring footballer

In the same Tatler interview, Daggers shared his boyhood dream of becoming a professional football player. He managed to go semi-professional, playing for Hayes FC as a centre midfielder. However, this Arsenal supporter’s football dreams were dashed after a collarbone injury. When that door closed, Daggers told Country & Town House in May, “I realised that I didn’t want to continue with education and that I wanted to get some independence.”

So, at just 17, he started working for an independent estate agency, Vickers & Company, in Maida Vale, where he sold his first property in 1997 for £110,000 (US$145,000). Within a decade, he’d landed a job at Knight Frank – a leading real estate consultancy.

He left Knight Frank under a cloud

Daggers definitely uses social media to his advantage and understood early on the benefits of growing a following – but this was also his downfall. In 2019, he left Knight Frank following his controversial decision to post pictures of a client’s £10 million [US$13.2 million] home on Instagram without permission, raising concerns about privacy. And while that “was a really difficult time”, as Daggers told PrimeResi in October 2022, it also “freed me to really pursue what I knew was the future”.

DDRE Global and other ventures

Soon after his departure from Knight Frank, Daggers founded DDRE Global. Talking to Country & Town House in May, he described his company as “the sixth most influential real estate business across the UK when it comes to marketing and selling homes over £5 million [US$6.6 million]”. DDRE Global also includes DDRE Studios, which specialises in digital content production.

Recently, Daggers launched his DDRE Academy, to support agents and service providers in their careers. He’s also the founder of marketing platform ADVSR.ai.

He has advice for the industry when it comes to AI

Daggers is of the opinion that the only way for property agents to surpass AI is to create content and a personal brand that people can connect with. “It is now one of the only ways you can protect yourself from the sea of AI models,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post, adding that “what AI can’t do is create personal bonds between people”.

On the other hand, he seems to be adopting virtual reality, as seen on Buying London – but as he admitted to House Beautiful in May, he hasn’t “used it with clients”.