The Adventure of the House Hunting

I find myself edging ever closer to being a fully functioning adult as the wheels are very much in motion to begin the process of owning my own home. It is of course hugely exciting and I keep coming up with ever more reasons why it will be fantastic- the latest being the realisation that I will be able to live in a town that actually has pizza places that will deliver to the door. There's an element of fear to it as well- whilst I know I can look after myself, I lived away from home for four years when I was a student, living with no other human beings in the home is a little daunting. 

Before all that though, I've got what is essentially a sea of admin ahead of me. My mortgage offer in principle will be confirmed any day now and so I'm finding myself wading through a seemingly endless online property listings. It turns out looking at houses is complicated and I'm basically having to learn a whole new language. So far I've discovered that the word 'maisonette' tends to refer to a first floor flat with some stairs and that 'peppercorn ground rent' has nothing to do with seasoning. 

Even beyond the more formal terms, there's a load of what I have quickly begun to refer to as 'estate agent bullshit'. Generally, when you look at the listings of second-hand items online, most will give you a fair description of any problems with the item. Estate agents lack this sort of moral fibre and try their best to make every home sound like it's Buckingham Palace. Once you start reading between the lines you begin to see that things are far more complicated. They like to use phrases like "full of character" which I've learned essentially means 'old'. Another favorite is when they write something along the lines of "a short stroll from the beach" which appears to be estate agent code for 'this is a shit area'. Most bafflingly of all is the phrase "popular" or "sought-after" location. As far as I can tell all this means is that people live in the area and the houses are not left empty, which seems obvious. 

It's not just in words that the estate agents like to be deceiving. Each listing comes with a series of images of the house but the agent has to select which one will be the headline image that shows up on the listing. Of course, they choose the image they think will most make you want to click on the listing, meaning that if the image shows the interior of the house there's a high chance it's in a bad location or if they show the exterior that it's either small or needs a lot of work done inside.

Now obviously the agents send someone round to take photos of the property and the current owner must know this is happening. It's staggering to me that so many don't seem to bother making any effort to tidy up. I've seen kitchens with piles of unwashed dishes, living rooms full of clutter and bedrooms where they haven't even bothered to make the bed. On one listing the current owner didn't even bother to leave the room when the photos were being taken and can be seen to the side of the image sat on the sofa watching TV! People are weird.

Yet another minefield is working out what local areas actually mean. If you go back in time a few hundred years you'd find lots of small villages that were relatively close together. As urbanisation has occurred these villages have all merged into one huge conurbation yet for some reason the original village names still define the area. Except that these areas now lack any defined boundaries, to the extent I've looked at three properties that were literally a stone's throw away from each other yet were somehow all listed as being in different areas. 

And there are the prices which are not exact figures but 'asking prices'. This means that the price listed is really only an estimate of what the property will actually sell for, meaning that there is the potential for some properties listed within my budget to in reality be unaffordable yet at the same time some listed as too expensive to actually be affordable. 

It's a nightmare and I can't understand why things have to be so complicated. The estate agents try to deceive you in any way they can, plus they use all sorts of jargon you have to decipher too, no-one can really decide for definite which area the house is in and the price they list is essentially just a ballpark figure. I am well aware that this is only the beginning as once I've actually made a decision I will have to face a whole slew of new admin nightmares, but that's a conversation for another day...