Southerly backing garden

lessonlearned

Actually you did say that by walking out of a viewing it would make the EA realise that misleading descriptions are a waste of their own time.

This is a long way from your more polite and reasoned reply just now......

Nowadays an EA would not give a misleading description, it's more than their job is worth. Instead they will not mention the orientation of the house as someone has already pointed out.

As for the EA wasting their time, not necessarily, it is part of the EAs job to offer options.

So.......once again although the North facjng garden may not be ideal there may be compensations which the EA feels may be of interest to the viewer.

I have done this myself. I have sold properties to people which, on paper, did not meet their criteria. Sometimes people see a house they fall in love with which doesn't bear any resemblance to what they thought they wanted, but they have been open minded enough to take a look and have changed their mind.

I have done the same thing myself, bought a property which wasn't what I thought I wanted, until I actually bothered to view it.

In my 30 years selling houses I never came across anyone who was so utterly fixated with South facing gardens to the point of it being an absolute deal breaker. The house would have to have fallen short in other areas as well.

Most people have a check list of must haves, followed by nice to haves, a south facing garden is usually a "nice to have".

DandelionPatrol

lessonlearned wrote: »

Actually you did say that by walking out of a viewing it would make the EA realise that misleading descriptions are a waste of their own time.

This is a long way from your more polite and reasoned reply just now......

It is still walking out of a viewing. And to make the EA realise that the misleading description was a waste of your time, you do have to say why you are cutting the viewing short.

This really is not about south backing gardens. This is about dealing with the agent giving you properties which do not meet your criteria. And yes, sometimes agents do try to get people through the door in order to look busy to the vendors.

lessonlearned

Although the 1991 Property Misdescriptions Act was repealed in 2013 it has been replaced with regulations covered by a number of Unfair Trading pieces of legislation.

Given These have more teeth and the repercussions of flouting these rules can be pretty serious It is doubtful whether many EAs these days would deliberately mislead potential purchasers in the way you describe.

They would not lie about a south facing garden, in fact as another poster has commented most of them will get out their mobile phones and double check for you. The viewer only has to asK.

And yes, EAs will show properties that may not match the viewers criteria. They are working for the Vendor not the purchaser, and as I pointed out you would be surprised just how many people do actually change their minds about what they want.

If you do want someone to weed out unsuitable properties on your behalf then you need to look at using a Property Finder service.

lessonlearned

Re the prevalence of North facing gardens.

You will often find this to be the case in older properties.

I was once told that the reason for this was down to superstition.

You will notice that Many older properties have the kitchen at the back. Apparently superstition had it that the plague came from the south, hence the front of the house faced south, whilst the back of the house, with the kitchen, faced North to avoid the plague.

A more practical answer might be that kitchens get hot, a south or west facing kitchen can be quite uncomfortable when the oven is going full belt. My west facing kitchen and garden were fabulous, as long as I didn't want to,use the oven.

I came across Many house buying superstitions during my career, the most obvious one being the no 13.

For many years I worked selling new builds. To my utter astonishment I found that a lot of people would not buy a house with a green door, so in those cases we simply offered them a white door instead, which was the only change the planning department at the local authority would allow.

I never did find out why some people had such an aversion to green doors, other than the colour green was meant to be an unlucky colour when applied to doors, ok on walls though......

Then of course with the rising popularity of Feung Shui there were another set of preferences for purchasers to think about.;)

jacko74

^^^ That's all very interesting about the prevalence of north facing back gardens.

I did wonder if it was down to ancient beliefs and traditional ways of doing things... for instance Iron Age settlers always built their roundhouses with the entrance facing south, has this building practice just somehow subconsciously continued for all that time!?

Davesnave

lessonlearned wrote: »

And yes, EAs will show properties that may not match the viewers criteria. They are working for the Vendor not the purchaser, and as I pointed out you would be surprised just how many people do actually change their minds about what they want.

I'm glad you 'get' what I'm talking about with reference to the lie of the land and seeing places in the real world rather than the virtual world, however useful that is for initial research.

Being a gardener, I know there is more to this than simply whipping out a compass. For example, my own north facing front garden has plenty of sun, but the areas that do receive shade are useful microclimates for plants I can't easily grow elsewhere.

As regards changing one's mind...... I laughed at the stupid house our friends purchased, because it was totally out of character for the area we lived in, yet only three years later, we bought it from them and lived happily in it for 21 years.

Nowt so queer as folk, eh?

car0line123

With the shortage of available properties in my area, I wish we could have the luxury to worry about South or North facing gardens!

Davesnave

car0line123 wrote: »

With the shortage of available properties in my area, I wish we could have the luxury to worry about South or North facing gardens!

Well, that's it in a nutshell, the C word: compromise.

Those setting out on their first house hunting adventure probably imagine that they'll get most of their boxes ticked. Then reality sets in.

Stuff like loads of space for outdoor leisure tends to be pushed further down the list.

Even later on, when the mortgage is paid and the kids have flown, that idyllic outdoor space may come at a cost: in my case, a fairly cheap but needy property which has had to be gutted and rebuilt.

lessonlearned

jacko74 wrote: »

^^^ That's all very interesting about the prevalence of north facing back gardens.

I did wonder if it was down to ancient beliefs and traditional ways of doing things... for instance Iron Age settlers always built their roundhouses with the entrance facing south, has this building practice just somehow subconsciously continued for all that time!?

Its all fascinating stuff isn't it. You could be right, a sort of collective folk memory passed down through the millennia, as you say maybe even going back to the iRon Age. Maybe by facing south those Iron Age settlers were protecting themselves from other warring tribes. Maybe it had some kind of defensive advantage.

The other thing I wondered was, with the invention of windows, if a room faced south then there would be passive solar gain.. Meanwhile the back of the house had the kitchen wihich would have had some form of range which have been kept burning all day.

Today we still like houses that feel light and spacious. And of course we like the advantages of passive solar gain to reduce heating bills.

There have been some really interesting studies with both humans and animals. Animals such as cats and dogs will always find that patch of sunlight to lie in, whether inside or outside.

Children were watched to see where they would play. Even though the artificial light was tweaked to the same brightness and intensity as sunlight, the children naturally gravitated to the area bathed in sunlight.

It seems we are biologically programmed to choose the sunny side of the street.

DaftyDuck

Re older houses, particularly farms, kitchens at the back, facing north, are cooler, better for food preservation, and the (normally prevailing) south wind takes the smells, smoke and flies away. It wasn't so much the plague as the stench of rotting food... but the belief that the miasma, or smell, carried disease played its part.

South-facing parlour to the front and west of the house allowed the womenfolk to sew late into the evening (while we menfolk could smoke a cigar in the dining room with the port).

(An unrelated oddity springs to mind... for those of you buying old timbered buildings, always check for rot around the back door, low down on the hinge side walls. Much more prevalent in old inns. A lowest-denomination coin will be spent for the correct reason). )