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The process of buying a house last year was an exercise in testing the outer reaches of my sanity.
We arrived at beaten-up homes that bore no resemblance to their Rightmove photos, dealt with a host of 19-year-old estate agents who could barely recall a street name let alone usher through a sale and went to open days hosted by sellers who planned only to move “within a couple of years”.
From the moment you start looking to move in England, the process is replete with time-wasting and ineptitude, gazumping and gazundering and foot-dragging middlemen with zero accountability.
No wonder, then, that the most recent figures from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors show that the average home was on the market for more than five months in May. That figure has risen by 26pc in the last four years, and is now at its highest for almost a decade.
One in three sales fall through completely, at a cost of £400m each year, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has tried to sell a home recently. Proof, if it were needed, of England’s broken house-buying system.
An exercise in patience
I found myself caught up in this mess last year when moving from my north London two-bed to a house in east London.
The first agents – who I enlisted because they charged more than anyone else on the market – led me to believe they would live up to their “elite” claims. However, they took the listing photos from bizarre angles, made numerous appointments that never materialised and secured one offer … at £70,000 under the asking price.
I switched agencies, to one with adults in charge. Yet despite deciding to sell chain-free – which meant needing to find somewhere temporary to live between selling my place and securing somewhere new – it still took six months to get the transaction over the line.
I had embarked on this route because I already had scant trust in the process. Buying my property over a decade ago, when both myself and the seller were chain-free, took seven months. I’d also had a failed attempt to sell a few years back.
It was less perilous, I reasoned, to spend an unquantifiable period with no fixed abode – while pregnant – than to imagine I could buy and sell in one neat transaction.
When I did find a buyer, I was thrilled to learn he was chain-free, too. Why, then, did it take half a year? And why, as things repeatedly threatened to fall through (including the bomb being dropped, two weeks prior to completion, that he didn’t intend to put down a penny in deposit) did I keep hearing from agents that I should be “grateful” things were going “quite quickly”?
It was this same message during my subsequent house purchase.
Despite our pleas to move in as soon as humanly possible (our interregnum “fix” was itself up for sale), completion was set for five months down the line. And so we ricocheted from one avoidable headache to the next: months of silence while the seller refused to speak with the estate agents, his solicitor’s no-email policy which meant conducting all business via dictation to his secretaries, who would type it up weeks later.
