ANGELA RUTTLEDGErealised that moving house is a painful business at any time, never mind during a property tsunami, but decided to go ahead anyway
‘FOND OF getting my own way, I figured we’d easily convince the bank to let us sell. The lenders would see this was a mutually beneficial move. Surely they would agree to the sale of security that is no longer valuable enough to cover the debt rather than keep losing money on the capital tied up in a tracker? The balance of the loan doesn’t have to be written off just because the security has gone; it’s a moveable feast, your very own ball and chain. Surely there must be thousands of people trying to make the same move?
So we put our house on the market. My latent-of-late scrubber instincts have me cleaning the front step (channelling little orphan Annie: “First the windows, then the floors, that way if I drip . . .”) as the first viewers arrive to look at our house on a sunny spring morning. Fifteen minutes earlier, the estate agent had arrived, and mooched around, opening doors and fiddling with dimmer switches.
“Off you go so,” he said.
“Yep, I’m just going. Grab the Hoover, will you?” I demanded, “Go over the stairs with it . . . beige carpet, it’s the bane of my existence.”
“You really need to go now,” he urged.
Somewhere in the course of the morning of that first house viewing I had dithered or dawdled or procrastinated; now I was paying the price, my presence was a serious breach of house-viewing etiquette.
What is the standard required for showing a house anyway?
“It should be like a boutique hotel, clean obviously, homely yet impersonal,” said a learned pal who sold her house during what they probably thought was the middle of the recession but in hindsight was just the tip of the iceberg.
She gave me a useful tip, “Keep a spare duvet and pillows dressed in the hot press, you won’t need to change the linen for every single viewing and the spare set looks crisp and fresh.”
My friend (still wrestling with a MyHome addiction) helpfully sends me links depicting outrageous lapses of viewing etiquette, “Look at this one . . . there’s a pin-up of a naked woman in the picture, you’d think the owners would have taken it down!”
Homely? I did try to infuse the house with the smell of baking, but I cheated by reheating a half loaf of banana bread.
Clean? Well
obviously, and all traces of cats and their accoutrements had to be removed. Pets were something our agent particularly referred to; some people have cat issues apparently.
He tells a story about showing a house that was home to a several reptiles, most of whom were caged. While showing a lady viewer the hall a snake draped himself over the banisters. Funnily enough, the customer didn’t bite, nor did she ever look at another house on the estate agent’s books.
He has also shown viewers a bedroom replete with a sleeping teenager and more than one sittingroom containing a grandfather in a string vest.
My sage agent also warned me not to leave any appliances on; he says it’s quite difficult to promote the virtues of an open-plan cottage while the washing machine is bouncing through a spin cycle.
On the other hand, nothing puts the potential purchasers in the mood like a posy of antique white roses. But around week three of the viewings I got sick of being first at the flower stand and bought a pink flowering hydrangea plant instead. Flowers should be a treat, not an investment in negative equity minimisation.
Striving for impersonal, I shoved our toiletries into a plastic bag and threw them in the shed along with the dirty laundry, the clean laundry and the cat bed (never hide anything under your own bed, potential purchasers will see the clutter and assume there’s a storage issue).
But what if, despite our efforts, our poor little house didn’t sell at all? What if we had to go through months maintaining the homestead in the standard of Claridges with nothing to show for it but a Jo Malone candle and two relieved cats? I felt very exposed. I wanted the house sold before the fact of its being on the market was old news. This wasn’t the old days and we sure wouldn’t be hinting at how much we’d made on the twist. Before the flought – that’s flood-drought, because an upset property market deserves its own weather system – there were plenty of enthusiasts willing to buy a fixer-upper at any price (and plenty of lenders willing to fund them).
There were also many folks willing to pay a premium for a nicely refurbished pad, busy people who didn’t want the hassle and uncertainty of a big renovation. Well, we’d bought our fixer-upper and fixed it up, would anybody be willing or able to pay us a decent fraction of what we spent on it?
Fortunately we listened to our estate agent when he suggested a realistic selling price and he soon whittled the viewers down from nosey parkers to potential purchasers to bidders to the Purchasers (the capital P is for very precious cash or mortgage-approved buyer).
Two months after signing with the Purchasers we decide to move out, notwithstanding the fact that the sale has yet to be closed because we don’t have bank consent to sell our home. The guilt of delaying them from moving in is too much (I want to show them the delay isn’t down to us dawdling over the packing) and mentally we’ve already said goodbye to our first home.
Anyway, it’s impossible to concentrate on work with the thoughts of the move ahead of me. I can’t believe that it is this difficult to get a sign-off from the bank allowing us to sell and then carry the balance of our loan with us; this cannot be an unusual request these days, I hear myself saying down the phone again and again.
So, we re-pot ourselves, temporarily at least. It’s during this move (just 2 km, how is it that half our belongings go missing? Where is the tweezers? Where is the mobile phone charger?) that our solicitor (a suitably persuasive young woman with the patience of an angel) calls to let me know we’ve finally got the nod from the bank and the sale is completed.
My faith is restored in the power of persistence; I hope we’ve made the right move.
