Why are you moving?/Have you ever been burgled?

tbs624

m00m00 wrote: »

students are generally crime magnets as they tend to be utterly lacking in common sense.

they move into houses in fairly dodgy area, bring in lots of high value electronics, and walk around with expensive phones, laptops and mp3 players, and wonder why the local scum thinks it's christmas every new academic year.

It's also the case that a burglar knows that a student property with five tenants may well have 5 tellies, 5 DVD players etc compared to a family property with only one or two so a much bigger potential haul for the same (or less) effort.

It's easier too for random unknowns to come and go unnoticed in student areas, purely because other residents are used to seeing folk that they don't know lugging boxes and bulging bin bags around and tend not to give it a great deal of thought.

My own experience of being burgled some years back had a charm all of its own: we'd bought an older house, had builders in, who had replaced one of the ground floor windows at the back. This was prior to all the namby pamby hermetically sealed glazing that is used now and, whilst we were out at one the DIY sheds, some little beast simply removed putty &pins, carefully lifted the unbroken glass out & neatly stood it against the wall before helping himself to our worldy goods. He had to re-use the window to leave though as the doors all had high security deadlocks.

The reason we had gone out was to get timber for a large "****-off " gate to ...erm...prevent access to the back of the property ...:(

LillyJ

I got burgled when I was a student; it was easter so they assumed we weren't there - but 2 of us were as we had to do lab work.
I was at my boyfriend's till late watching a DVD and my housemate was at the pub. She arrived back about 1 and me an hour later after a phone call saying "I think you've been burgled". Which was odd as it is normally pretty obvious!
What she meant by that was - your room is a mess and it isn't normally. What she failed to mention was the panel in the back door had been removed and was lying outside.
Her and my other housemate's rooms hadn't had anything stolen - prob because they were so messy they wouldn't have been able to find anything! It was very frustrating. I also couldn't afford insurance at the time and had saved up for 4 years for a laptop. It had all my work on it and me being an idiot hadn't backed most of it up.
Have never been so upset in all my life.

The housemate didn't even ring the police - she didn't think it was a big deal.

Hatster

My parents once had an attempted burglary - and again, they got a phone call from my sister saying 'I think you might have been burgled, but I'm not sure'! The burglars had opened a side window of a big bay window, and had then carefully moved all the plants that my mum had growing on the windowsill and around the windows outside onto the terrace, and had then climbed in. At which point my dad's famous home-made burglar alarm went off, the burglars tried to find it and break it, found and broke an old, unused doorbell instead, the burglar alarm kept ringing, and the burglars gave up and left. My mum was really disappointed - she reckons a burglary is her only chance to get rid of my dad's [STRIKE]junk [/STRIKE] valueable antiques :-)

han2505

Were moving because we#ve been burgled on more than one occastion but we aint going to tell viewers unless they ask. I wont lie to them though, as as much as i want to get out, i couldnt put someone else through the hell were going through. Just might not tell them how many times.

it's hard though x

Catblue

When we sold our house last year, the buyer's solicitor sent us a list of supplementary questions to the Sellers' Property Information Form.

Two of these questions were "Has the house ever been burgled?" and "If so, please provide dates".

So if it is a worry to you, then you can always get your solicitor to submit the questions in writing. The benefit of doing this is that then you would have written proof of the vendor's response.

neverdespairgirl

tbs624 wrote: »

My own experience of being burgled some years back had a charm all of its own: we'd bought an older house, had builders in, who had replaced one of the ground floor windows at the back.

My parents' London house has never been burgled. Their country house in Kent was, once, in the late 1980s. There wasn't much valuable there, but they took the TV, all the towels, and a lot of tinned food.

tbs624

neverdespairgirl wrote: »

.......they took the TV, all the towels, and a lot of tinned food.

Weird combination......you get all sorts of mental images of what the burglars may have been doing with their trawl afterwards....

churchrat

we were burgled yrs ago by an oaf who had just been let out of prison. he did the whole street and by the time he got to us must have been thirsty after his busy day cos he made himself a cup of tea!!!!! the police got his finger prints from the mug. the really funny thing was that he had put the tea bag in the bin

LillyJ

Oooh I forgot my parent's garage once got burgled, they took a fair few quids worth of freezer food (chest freezer with whole turkeys, prawns etc in), and lots of wine and champagne, but left the bikes, golf clubs, skis, power tools etc!
Must have been hungry.

Optimisticpair

In the eighties I was burgled while moving from a rented flat in an exposed corner position to our own first house in a quiet street with neighbours opposite. Knowing it was asking for trouble to leave the car unattended my OH and I took it in turns to fetch boxes and guard the car. To cut down on time we both went to the house to unload the car. When we got back the flat door had been kicked in and the tv had gone.

As a side note I have never been burgled when I have had a dog.