Looking at houses - the camera can lie

The first thing you do when you want to move is to look around at the market to find out how much your house might be worth and whether there's anything you want to buy. Beware of estate agents. They will all try to get you in their clutches and none of them will say for sure how much they will charge in fees,

"Well, it depends on so many things I can't really say at the moment." No of course you can't but it's bound to be more than I thought plus VAT.

Anyway, estate agents are useful for valuing your house. You can hold out for more than they say but you may have a long wait to get a buyer and you may have to come down in the end.

Let's assume you know roughly how much you might get for your house and how much you might spend on another one. So, off you go house hunting and the first place you'll probably look is the internet. The first thing you'll look at is the price, and the second thing is the picture. Oh dear. This is where it gets really interesting. You know how the camera can't lie unless the photo's manipulated, enhanced or touched up in any other way? Wrong! I strongly suspect that all estate agents are given some basic lessons in trick photography.

"Don't point the camera straight at the property. Yes I know it's a drab, poky little hole but if you just come to one side a bit so that it's at an angle it makes it look much bigger."

"Now then. Whatever you do, size up the immediate surroundings and make sure you don't include that huge derelict old industrial building that's looming over the property."

"Oh come on. Do have a bit of common sense. If you just stand there and take the garden like that it'll look as small as it really is. Hold the camera low down and take it more on the diagonal. That way it looks like a big sweep of lawn. Try not include the rubbish lying around."

Now that we've been house hunting for a while we've learned not to expect the house that we see in the photo. Even if the house looks vaguely like the picture on the details the garden will not. Overnight it will have metamorphosed into a tiny patch on so many different levels that only a circus monkey could navigate it. What we have learned is that if we are lucky enough to work out where the house is we can sometimes pinpoint it on Google Earth. In this way we can see, roughly how big the garden is. We can also see what's in the immediate environs and decide whether it's worth a look. In one case recently, a lovely looking granite house turned out to be in such an undesirable area that I suspect the owners will have to give it away. All this was uncovered by google earth and a quick search of google. Good luck with your house hunting.

It's a buyer's market..or so I was led to believe

For the last two months I’ve been carrying out an electronic estate agent crawl to find the house of my dreams. I have been egged on by our two dogs who want a bigger garden and sniggered at by my husband who said our house was only worth 5p. I’ve even gone as far as to engage an estate agent (excuse the language) who is going to charge a small fortune in the unlikely event that he can sell our house which is worth at least 6p.
Eventually I persuaded a doubting husband to come with me on some house viewings and at the appointed hour we turned up outside our first cottage. We were both still innocents in the house hunting game and so we were eager and full of hope and surprised at how easy it was to find just what we were looking for…..at least what we thought we were looking for.
The first thing we noticed was that the “cottage” didn’t have front door. This is a bit of a disadvantage when something is described as being semi- detached and you’re looking for the way in, but not to worry, the details said this house was worth more than 6p so it could only be a step up the property ladder. The details also said it would be possible to create a nice big parking space at the front of the “cottage,“ but what they didn’t say was that someone with a digger would have to attempt to negotiate a lane that was only just big enough for our car and then dig out tons and tons of soil and subsoil first. In order for this to proceed an electricity pole would need to be moved at enormous expense and we would need to build a substantial retaining wall. That is if we got planning permission. I won’t go into the rest of it in detail but suffice to say that the sitting tenant, the lack of facilities, the rooms with standing room for one small person, the large amount of expensive fencing required, the general filth and the high price tag meant that this cottage wasn‘t quite what we were looking for. I would even go as far as to say it was possibly only worth 2p at a jumble sale.
After that first experience we were a bit more cautious but we still thought maybe this was a one off and that all the other houses would be better. After all, we’d seen Kirsty Allsop and Phil Spencer doing the rounds of lovely houses on the telly and we’d seen hopeful purchasers going from room to room saying, “This is a nice size.” And so we did the rounds of houses and what rounds they were.
Not one single one of them lived up to the descriptions on the details. If it needed cleaning and redecorating the whole place stank to high heaven and needed substantial internal repairs. If there was off road parking it was on the understanding that the legal dispute would eventually be settled in your favour and that everyone would move their cars, you could knock down a party wall to get to the garage in the back garden and then agree never to leave the garage again because six more car owners have parked across the drive. Then there was the charming cottage with the huge garden and the falling down fences and the area that would be ideal for bog plants, and the lack of a kitchen and once again the possible off road parking that would involve a major building operation. To say that we had many disappointments would be putting it mildly and we’ve learned a lot about estate agents.
Their main priority is to get you through the door before they give you the bad news or in our case the bad news is so obvious that it screams from every room.
If the agent says something’s in a semi rural village you shouldn’t expect fields nearby. Semi rural means you might spot a silo in the distance if it’s a clear day and you climb onto the roof with binoculars.
If they say the gardens are easily maintained they mean squares of concrete about 3 feet by 3 feet at the back and front of the house.
Beware of possible off road parking. It’s not there already because the job was too daunting for someone else.
Doubly beware of “In need of a bit of decoration,” as this means it needs gutting. “In need of some TLC,“ is going to be a major building job, and “In need of refurbishment,” means you’ll have to wait for planning permission before you can demolish it and start again.
I could go on but no doubt you’ve seen these lists many times before and still gone on hoping to find some honest details somewhere. I wish you luck with your house search. We’re still looking but hope is fading fast and I understand now why we couldn’t sell our house on eBay…… But that‘s another story.

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