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.