Buyers, what have you seen?

Orpheo

We all know that EA's house particulars are economical with the truth, OK, full of lies and that EA's photos are either rubbish, manipulated or doctored. The thing is, we buyers go to view houses and what what meets us when we get there is often, shall we say unexpected (in the real sense of the word unexpected not in the sense used by the BBC, govt and BOE where unexpected=plainly obvious.)

Buyers, when viewing houses, what have been your !!!!!! moments?

Mine:

• a go-kart hanging on the wall in the hall.
• artexed walls in the lounge, stained yellow with tobacco and pub-style wall lights.
• a cat lady house where the floors were literally an inch thick with cat fur.
• a vendor pointing to a road near the house and telling me that work was starting to widen it and also telling me that they often had long powercuts in winter.
• a vendor proudly showing me his DIY bedroom units. They were abysmal. On the upside, we bought the house and they were the first thing to go.

Cissi

My favourite EA expression was years ago, when we first moved to London. Having made it clear that we could compromise on many things and may be prepared to accept a (not too busy) railway at the bottom of a long garden, for example, but that traffic right outside our front door was a no-no, we were taken to see a house that had "only just come onto the market", with no details available yet. It turned out to be a dilapidated period house with loads of potential, right on the edge of a large park - but not only was it on a hugely busy main road, it was RIGHT on it, with no front garden whatsoever. As we listened to cars and buses thundering past within touching distance, the EA tried to convince us that it wasn't a problem, really, because the road had just been relaid with a new type of special, quiet tarmac :T

To this day, whenever we drive past that stretch, DH and I look at each other and exclaim in unison: "Quiet tarmac!" :rotfl:

Orpheo

Cissi wrote: »

"Quiet tarmac!" :rotfl:

Only from the lips of an EA. :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Huggy_Bear

I've had today 'a double garage just a few yards from the house' - it was out the front door around the corner and down the road i.e completely away from the house and you really would not park the car there!!:T

Grimbal

Cissi wrote: »

"Quiet tarmac!" :rotfl:

Now, I'm not normally one for defending EAs in any way, but he may have been referring to noise reduction tarmac. I know part of the M2 has it, and so apparently does Hillingdon

Guitar

Where I live there's not much to choose from excepts lots of these very crappy flats. The all look like normal terrace houses but ground and first floor are actually self contained flats with their own front doors next to each other.

There's loads of these on the market and the only difference between them is the decoration and the asking price, which varies wildly.

I'd viewed a few of these before I started ignoring them completely a couple years ago. I'd been to view one and the viewing was over very quickly because I knew the layout of the place already, pretty much seen it all before. The agent conducting the viewing suggested he show me another flat in a street nearby which he thought was perfect for a 'young professional' like myself.

We walked over to the flat and unsurprising it was yet another of these cookie cutter flats, this one on the first floor.

He knocks on the front door and a middle aged chubby guy with a comb over and wearing a woolly jumper with a liquorice allsorts pattern answers the door. The agent explains he's just brought me round to show me the flat. "No problem" the man says, grinning rather enthusiastically. "He's happy to get a viewing" I think.

I follow the agent up the stairs and when we get to the landing I see that it's just the usual flat layout and I know where everything is without even looking. Only difference with this flat is that the landing was very bare compared to most flats, at first I remember it reminded me of the stairwells in public buildings.

Then the agent did something very strange.

The agent open the cupboard where usually the electric and gas meters were kept, he walked inside.

I walked over and looked in and was amazed to find a front door in the cupboard. The agent opens this door and I follow him up a very narrow, winding flight of stairs up into the loft of the building. This turned out to be a studio flat. There was a double bed, a tiny kitchen and small couch between them. At the top of the stairs there was a cupboard containing a shower and a toilet.

Even more bizarrely was that because this was a loft conversion the entire room looked like it was sliced in half diagonally with the slope of the roof. It had one window.

I just stood there staring at the agent. "What do you think?" he said. "It's someone's loft!" I said.


I later found it on right move. Asking price was £5k more than the proper flat underneath would normally go for.

Cissi

Grimbal wrote: »

Now, I'm not normally one for defending EAs in anyway, but he may have been referring to noise reduction tarmac. I know part of the M2 has it, and so apparently does Hillingdon

*checks outside the window for flying pigs*

Oh I don't doubt that it was special tarmac - it does actually feel quite smooth to drive over that particular stretch - but the point was that it hardly made any difference in this particular house, or in any case not enough to make us seriously consider it. Apart from the noise, you also stepped right from the front door onto the narrow pavement, and considering that we'd stipulated that we wanted to be on a side road, ideally a quiet residential road, this hardly ticked our boxes.

This was a pretty unique house and quite likely a good compromise for someone else, but the point is that the EA hadn't listened to our requirements but instead tried to ram his own agenda down our throats.

Gingernutty

Looking for a freehold property in the West Midlands close to all transport links for less than £65,000, meant I was looking at a lot of 'fixer-uppers'.

I was an enthusiastic viewer and saw a large number of houses in the Wolverhampton area before settling in the red light district. :eek:

There are a few that stick out......

The one where the evicted tenants had sellotaped over all the air bricks, had all the internal panes of the double glazing units broken and a mass of slug trails across the front room carpet was an eye-opener.

The semi detached house next door to a derelict commercial premises where all the neighbour's internal walls were exposed to the weather so that the house I viewed was so damp that the wallpaper was pinned to the walls.

It was at that house that there was a large guard dog outside in the back garden and the estate agent and I were so scared of it that I couldn't see the outside at all.

I know, I was just 'showing willing' at that point.

The 'recently refurbished' house in a cul-de-sac in one of Wolverhampton's more notorious estates was fantastic.

When newly built, it had been rented by a family for decades. Now the old couple had been moved out to nursing homes and the landlord's children wanted to get rid asap.

There were two different kinds of mould sprouting out of the downstairs walls which had been gloss painted to try and cover it, all the fireplaces were still intact - in fact the coal shovel was still in the coal cupboard 'built in' to the outside wall (ooooooh, the luxury!:rotfl:), there was no central heating, no double glazing, the garden sat just by an elevated train line which ran heavy freight and such filthy tracks had been worn into the carpet by the pensioners that I could feel myself sticking to the carpets.

The house in Park Village so loaded with clutter and hoarded junk that one surveyor refused to go in because he considered it unsafe. The house owner genuinely thought it was worth £10,000 more than everyone else did (including his own estate agent :rotfl:).

Then there was the house where the evicted tenants were squatting and had barricaded the front door, letting no one in. They, themselves were getting in and out via the back door. The EA and I just looked at it from across the road.

Another house had recently been redecorated with what looked like the kind of yellow paint one sees making the double yellow lines on the road. Every room was painted with this 'job lot' of yellow and all the external woodwork as well. By woodwork, I mean the double glazing frames. :eek:

The 'recently refurbished' house where, when I walked into one room and stood on a wonky floorboard, the skirting fell off the wall.

And my favouritest of them all.......

The house owned by a 'slumlord' where there were two immigrants to each room, separated by curtains which were hanging from rails attached to the ceilings and there were even two men each sleeping in what should have been the front and back rooms. A simple three up, three down mid-terrace with a kitchen and bathroom extension, slept 10 people.

Each man had a mattress, a small chest of drawers and a state of the art phone attached to a charger and as the male EA and I toured the house, the tenants just stood and glowered at us.

Huggy_Bear

Gingernutty wrote: »

Another house had recently been redecorated with what looked like the kind of yellow paint one sees making the double yellow lines on the road. Every room was painted with this 'job lot' of yellow and all the external woodwork as well. By woodwork, I mean the double glazing frames. :eek:

what like Dell Boy :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Gingernutty

You know, it could have been - it looked exactly like their mother's headstone......I didn't stick around to see if it glowed in the dark, though!

zara*elise

We saw one place marketed as needing 'light modernisation'. Asked the agents how much was needed and he said a lick of paint here, maybe a new kitchen. Went to see the place and the guy had done all the DIY himself ten years ago. He obviously didn't have talent for it, he'd removed all the ceilings and put Stirling board up instead, unpainted, and had been using the fireplace but the chimney was blocked. Then he went on to say how his wife had a nervous breakdown and that's why they needed to sell ASAP so if we offered full asking price they'd be ready to complete in a matter of weeks.

Then when we asked about extensions he said when we have kids it would need extending. Said we're not having kids and he looked seriously offended, stopped all the chitchat, led us outside and slammed the door.

Odd.