Recently, I’ve been scoping out a lot of houses with a view to purchase. Thankfully, I can stop now, as with any luck I’ve found my as-close-to-ideal-as-is-realistic-home.
The following are my observations about how not to entice buyers:
- Still live there
Sorry, but vacant properties are so much nicer to scope out. There’s usually a minimum amount of the previous occupiers stuff there, which makes it easier to imagine how it would look with your stuff in it. The rooms naturally look bigger with less clutter in them, and you feel less English about poking around all the corners. - Rent the place out to a Polish mechanic who turns up half way through a viewing and starts screaming at the potential purchaser and the estate agent to get out his house before he knifes them
Self explanitory, one feels. - Get a mate to do a really shoddy job doing the place up
If you’re not going to do a decent job of doing somewhere up, don’t bother. It’s very disheartening to see what at first glance looks like a nicely done up place, only to realise that in fact it’s such a mess you’d have to rip everything out and start again anyway. For Heaven’s sake, if you’ve gone to the trouble of hanging new doors, plane the bottoms properly so they don’t need a shove to open them. - Notice that the ‘For Sale’ sign’s blown down but don’t actually bother to pick it up
- When your potential purchaser turns up, open the front door a crack and snap ‘Come round the back’
- Answer the door in your slippers (at 1400), with chocolate all over your face
- Explain that you’re trying to cook, do the washing and half a dozen other things, and you could really have done without visitors today
- Leave bags of shopping in the middle of the dinning room
- Have bin liners full of rubbish all over the back yard
- Allow your small yappy dog to attempt to savage your potential purchaser’s ankles.
Those last seven were all the same vendor, by the way. So, if you really don’t want to sell your house, that’s the way to do it.
July 29, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Congrats on finding a place there.
I must admit, I’m glad most were by the same person. I was beginning to think you had the beginnings of an extreme property programme there.
July 30, 2007 at 8:27 am
Oh, there were all sorts of other things, this were just the ones I remembered best. There was the place with three different and seperate dodgy put-up extensions, for example.
Although you’d still have to go a way to beat numnber 2.
July 31, 2007 at 2:19 pm
Good grief. The place I’m moving to might be in an ‘interesting’ state, but it was unoccupied so we didn’t have any of those issues. Mind you, the estate agent wasn’t doing a very good job of selling it, but at least she wasn’t yelling at us in Polish, covered in chocolate or attacking us with a yapping machine.
August 1, 2007 at 8:39 pm
*giggling*
It’s always much better to be shown round by estate agents. Even if the vendors are still inhabiting the place, if you are with an estate agent you can open and shut all the kitchen drawers, open the airing cupboard to see if it actually does contain shelves, and make sarcastic remarks about the decoration. Estate agents tend not to whisk you through the place saying “this is the living room”, but actually let you go round at your own speed.
Can I borrow your Polish tennant – there are people I’d like to have threatened by knife wielding mechanics right now.
Aphra.
August 3, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Sadly not AB, I drove past the house a few days ago and it’s been sold, so presumably the Polish mechanic has moved somewhere else. Hopefully not next to an estate agent, given his apparent dislike of them.
SL – place with ‘potential’, eh?
August 4, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Maybe they bought it sight unseen? Or looked round when the mechanic was out?
Potential is certainly the word…
November 4, 2007 at 8:53 am
i hope you will be writing in this more , i am fallowing you !
December 20, 2007 at 7:56 am
I would like to see a continuation of the topic