Room Hunting

I have commented over the past few years how traditional modes of residence have come back into style as work in the UK has become more geographically concentrated, pay has fallen in real terms and the cost of accommodation has risen particularly rapidly.  I guess I am wrong to have ever thought that I should perceive what I think of as ‘old fashioned’ modes of living as such.  It is clear that they are, in fact, part of lifestyles of the 2010s and completely bury the myth of a ‘property-owning democracy’ that was once peddled in this country.  Thus, I guess it is unsurprising that as a man in my forties, I have lived with my parents: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/never-as-bad-as-we-had-it.html ; in a guest house: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/living-in-guesthouse.html  and as a lodger: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/living-withas-lodger.html  Working in London I am again looking for accommodation, a process which is fraught with difficulty.  I am more alert to the hazards of 419 scammers in the market place for renting rooms: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/419-scams-connected-with-renting-room.html  and so far, this time round seem to have only encountered one.  This was a very low-key one without all the grandeur and fake photos of those I ran into back in 2013. 

One lesson I learnt back in 2009 is that there is no point in me responding to advertisements for rooms.  There are a number of characteristics which rule me out.  First is my age.  I am now in my mid-40s and for some reason people letting rooms seem to feel that there is something sinister about a man my age renting a room.  Even when they say in emails that they are happy to have me, meeting me they change their minds and I suddenly find the room has been ‘allocated to someone else’.  I accept I am overweight and unattractive, but I am clean and tidy and do domestic chores.  However, I clearly do not fit the image that people have of a young, dynamic businessman.  If I did, then presumably I would not have to rent a room. 

I think part of the problem is that they think that I will not tolerate poor things about the room.  I certainly think that if I am paying rent for a room, I should get all that is advertised.  Perhaps I am overly demanding in expecting cooking facilities and heating.  If you have a cooker and a heater, then they should work.  However, maybe this is too demanding and is what rules me out when there are others who will accept no heating or no cooking facility.  For me it is rather selfish because I know it is far more costly if I eat out every meal and I find I cannot stomach living on sandwiches constantly. 

The other key factor is that I am a man.  Around 75% of the advertisements I see specify that only women can rent the room.  At least people say this now up front, whereas in the past you had to ring or go there to find out ‘well, we’re actually looking for a woman’.  Yes, it is prejudicial, but I would rather see the prejudice before I waste my time.  Of course, no-one is allowed to specify ethnicity.  I am a very pale Caucasian.  I find that other people in that category do not want to rent to people like me because of the concerns about.  I get on far better with landlords/ladies who are South or East Asian.  However, not being from that background myself I am sometimes jumped over by someone ‘from the home country’.  This happens even when I have said I like a room and want to rent it.  Of course, in some cases it is just because they have met me and now the other negative aspects kick in.

One key negative aspect for me is the company that employs me and the fact that I now do administrative work.  For some reason there is a prejudice against people who do not work in making earnings.  Strangely I was told that people prefer a salesman on commission to someone who does a solid administrative job day-in/day-out.  Again, I think this comes down to the sense that an administrator renting a room must be a serial killer.  However, ironically, I am actually a better lodger as my income does not fluctuate and I certainly do not have alcoholic lunches and noisy celebrations the way some people in sales still do.  However, it is clear that it is better for me to lie about where I work and the nature of my work or run up against this prejudice.

The other thing is people’s sense of geography.  If I say that I want a room in North London, then clearly I will consider places in North-West London or North-East London and having a car and a parking space at work, I am not tied to bus, tube or train lines the way that many people are.  However, somewhere in South London or East London are of no use to me and it wastes my time to have to deal with these people contacting me.  Conversely, when I put an advertisement about being in a certain radius of work, I found I got no responses.  When I took this criterion off, I then had loads of people contacting me with properties precisely within that circle.  It is clear that, certainly in London, that people have little idea where their house is in relationship to other areas or even points of the compass.  I suppose if you travel just from home to work you do not gather this information.

I accept rent by the week.  However, there is now this common thing of accepting weekly rent and then after a period of time requesting the ‘make-up’ rent for the months which have passed.  This is because, aside from February in non-leap years, months have 2-3 days more than 4 x 7 days = 28 days.  Rent by calendar month appears to have disappeared and rental weeks that go over months also appear to be too difficult for landlords/ladies to work out, so you have this cluster of days, which add up to 29 days in a normal year, 30 days in a leap year.  Thus, you can suddenly be charged with an additional four weeks’ rent.  Storage places pull off this trick as well.  A key problem is that some charge you for it even when only four or six months have passed, so you have only tallied up a fraction of this additional month. 

I have now tried to rent three rooms only to have my application rejected or reneged on at the last moment.  I know the competition for renting a room is very high in London, but it is clear that my optimism that as when living in Exeter and Uxbridge that I would be able to find a place within a few weeks, has been entirely misplaced.  Though my income has fallen I did think I could rent somewhere at the same kind of level, with a 25% leeway, as I did last year.  It is clear that I need to accept that I am not going to find somewhere even within those parameters now and will have to put up with an unheated room or one with no access to cooking facilities if I want to rent for £4-500 per month.  Saying that, at this moment, I cannot even afford that.  I am not clear how I can go any lower in terms of finding somewhere to rent.  A job outside London or with higher pay is clearly necessary but is as difficult to conjure up than an affordable room as a lodger.

'Auctioning' Our House

With the fact that my benefits have been suspended due to action from my last employer and despite six interviews, I am finding it even harder to carry out the precise interview rituals that each company wants, we are well advanced on the path to having our house respossessed by the building society.  I must say that their attitude has improved from this situation twelve months ago.  Last year the society refused to even discuss the potential of me defaulting on my mortgage payments until I had less money than was needed to pay for a single month.  This year I have been able to discuss with their 'triage' team three months ahead of that date.  Of course, one option is to sell the house, but with the appalling weather and the stagnant housing market this has proven to be futile.  Last week with time really running out we decided to change tactics.  The woman who lives in my house and who shares the mortgage, signed up with a so-called 'express' estate agency which works in a very different way and one that seems to have gone in our favour, though not without some hiccoughs.

The company puts the house on the market well below the going rate for the district/street in which it is located.  It only publicises online and reuses images that you have provided to other estate agents.  Interestingly many letting agents and landlords/ladies apparently now has software which alerts them if a house comes on the market in a particular area or at a specific price.  The company will not take buyers who are in a 'chain', i.e. have to sell property to buy this one or have not already arranged to have funds available before putting in an offer.  Last year when we tried to sell the house, over a twelve month period we had three 'firm' offers but in each case the people could not either raise the money or wanted us to building on their behalf before they would complete the purchase so ultimately it was unsold after a year.

Anyway, this method seemed to work.  In reverse of what usually happens, the owners show people around the house but saying nothing about money, this is handled purely by a negotiator over the telephone.  Now, we had found many estate agents particularly useless at selling houses; they simply stood in the corner of the room waiting for questions.  They had no idea of the background of the viewers, for example, if they were buying to let, buying for themselves or others, had concerns such as local schools or health centres, etc.  So we felt we were much better positioned to do this aspect.  An extra advantage was that all of the viewings were scheduled for the same day, which meant we did not have to keep tidying and cleaning the house so it was in an immaculate state just for one viewer and then again for another a few days later and again a few days after that; it gets exhausting especially with a 10-year old boy living in the house.

An additional benefit is that the viewers can see who they are competing against.  Having all the viewings on the same day and then getting interested ones to telephone in an offer, makes it effectively an auction but one overseen by the company.  As they get 1.9% of the sale price they are keen to drive up the price by going back and forth between 'bidders'.  Anyway, we had 18 viewings with a total of 32 people plus a number of children.  At one stage there were four sets of viewers in the living room, so the competition was clearly visible.  The viewers were a mixture including a letting agent, representatives of landlords from this area and farther afield, people buying for relatives, couples wanting to rent the property out, young families and one retired couple.  To some degree this reflects the sort of people who want a suburban, 3-bedroomed semi-detached house.

The striking thing was how few people understood how the process worked.  Some thought me and the woman in the house were actually the estate agents, despite our casual clothes and were puzzled by the presence of the 10-year old boy once he returned from school.  One set of viewers thought we had driven down from Manchester where the company is based and were surprised about how much we knew about the local area.  Many expected us to be standing outside the house in the rain so did not even bother to knock or ring to come in.  Many did not understand the effective auction process despite details on the company's website.

It is incredible how many people in the UK misuse the phrase 'Dutch auction'.  Having had a tour around Dutch flower auctions I know how this works.  In these auctions, the price starts high and then falls in increments until someone puts in a bid.  This means that for any sale there is only a single bid which speeds up the sales.  Now, if this had been a Dutch auction as one man had somehow come to believe it was, it would not have started at £170,000  (€214,000; US$263,500) in a street where no other property has sold below £200,000.  No wonder this man was disappointed as the price went up from there rather than down.  How he had got that idea from the company's website I have no idea. 

Similarly the view that only 'sealed bids' were permitted was something else that viewers had dreamt up.  A sealed bid is usually only for when people are tendering to complete a project and in the past literally involved people putting their highest bid on a piece of paper and sealing it in an envelope and handing it in.  The seller or the one offering the work, opens all the envelopes and goes with the highest.  Again this would be a foolish way to sell a house as everyone knows you get the best price from competition between different bidders even with traditional estate agent methods.  It would be pointless to have a single day's viewing then expect sealed bids, but again, from somewhere, perhaps pure arrogance or experience in other contexts but certainly not from the website, people believed the sealed bid method would be used.

Others missed out on the fact that it was an auction and would only stay open for 24 hours.  When they said they would get back to us next week, I had to tell them forcefully that there was no point as the house would be sold by then.  We had already had two 'book offers' on or just above the reserve price so even if none of the 18 sets of viewers had been interested we could have gone back to them.  Perhaps the company needs to be even more explicit about how it runs these sales, but people also need to wake up and understand what they are getting themselves into.  It was almost like turning up at a car auction and expecting to be able to negotiate a deal as you would at a dealership.  For us, it worked out fine.  By 11.00 the next morning when the bidding closed, we had an offer of £195,000 (€245,700; US$302,250), so much better than what we had had by the traditional methods.  Of course, it is far less than the £217,000 we were offered but never received last year let alone the £240,000 (€302,400; US$372,000) we paid for it in 2005, but the property market and our own circumstances are far worse then then.  It is better to get anything rather than have the building society take the house from you.  The one drawback from this method is that you get no deposit so we have had to go and borrow more money so that we can each put down a deposit on a flat to rent.  Anyway, my brief and tortuous period as a property owner now finally closes and so means I cannot take out one of these new government loans to pay for my care when I am elderly and I continue my rapid fall out of the middle classes.

P.P. 13/09/2012
The process proved to be even more messy and unpleasant than I might have feared.  It turned out that the highest bidder had actually lied to the estate agents and was actually in a chain so when it came to progress the sale she was not in a position to do so.  We ended up with the third highest bidder, the second having gone on to spend their money elsewhere in the time we were being mucked around by the first bidder.  This third bidder was offering £182,000 compared to the £195,000 of the first bidder.  However, we had no choice but to accept.  Of course within three days of the exchange of contracts he insisted on reducing his offer.  He had seen that a derelict house in the same road had sold for £170,000, though neglecting to point out that three months later, when it was refurbished it sold for £247,000.  He was clearly upset that he had not seen the house at a cheaper price and decided to take it out on us.  Despite the fact that he had already arranged a loan for £182,000 and the documentation was with our solicitors he withdrew this.  The estate agent probably conscious that their commission was dropping like a stone, managed after 3 hours of negotiation to keep him at £172,000, losing us a further £10,000 and meaning we are now worse off than when we were offered £170,000 by a developer without the estate agent fees.  These men are going to turn £70,000 profit in less than 3 months as the house does not need to be refurbished, but as I have noted before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/property-in-uk-11-squeezing-out-little.html they feel insulted if they have not been able to squeeze out extra money at the last moment.  The auction process looked like it could deliver for us, but in the UK with those with wealth able to dictate in every transaction, taking such a personal attitude to everything and being determined not only to get the best deal, but as much more as they can squeeze, it is no better ultimately than a normal sale. 

I am just denigrated so much by people I am trying to business with as stupid and naive that I have come out of this feeling utterly dirty.  In Britain if you are an ordinary person, you are no longer permitted simply to buy and sell anything, whether a gift on eBay or a house without you being told that you must show such gratitude for being ripped off and accept that any buyer will come back to take more from you before the sale is done.

419 Scams Connected With Renting A Room

Previously I have commented on my experiences of living away from home Monday to Friday in order to work: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/12/living-in-guesthouse.html  This has put me into circumstances that I have characterised as fitting in with those portrayed in Arnold Bennett novels.  Earlier this year, I also commented on issues around living as a lodger:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2011/02/living-withas-lodger.html  These experiences are again relevant, as having finally found work in London, a city where I could neither afford to rent a flat, I have gone back to being a Monday to Friday lodger.  With the recession still raging and impacting on different parts of the country differently, weekly commuting is becoming a common practice in professional jobs.  This may be why parts of the M25 have been experiencing even worse jams than usual, especially on Fridays.

I commute over 300Km each week but during the working week able to walk to my job.  I am fortunate that I have ended up lodging with a nice couple in a quiet, clean and pleasant house with an excellent wireless internet connection; in an area where few people seem to use such facilities.  Two other men, 10-20 years younger than me, are also lodgers in the house, but our daily schedules seem to complement each other, so there are not queues for the bathroom.  The only real challenge is that the landlord wants his monthly rent in cash meaning repeated visits to the cashpoint machine once I receive my salary and making sure it is kept safely until I can hand it over to him in one large lump.

What this posting is about, are the stages before I was successful.  I had learnt a lot from looking for a room in order to work at my previous job.  Originally there I had spent time looking online and in newspapers, day after day, and telephoning for rooms at lunch or in the evening only to find the room had gone or to be summoned to an hour-long interview not to be rejected, simply not to be called back.  In London I know it has been even worse with the pressure for rooms meaning that for perverse reasons people letting rooms not only conduct interviews as stringent as applying for a job, but even have evening events to which the ‘candidates’ are invited in order to carry out activities worthy of ‘The Apprentice’ in order to ‘win’ the room.

The main reasons I had been rejected for renting a room were because I was a man and because I was 42.  I accept that there are many women home owners who do not want a strange man lodging in their house, though they often cannot say that explicitly in their advertisements.  Often the gender or single/couple status of those letting is not revealed either.  Men letting rooms usually have no problem with a male lodger, but unless there are gay (and only 10% of men are) many would prefer to have a female lodger too.

As for age, people seem to prefer someone ‘exciting’ even if, ironically, they just come home from work and slump in front of the television themselves.  In the exercises to select a lodger this is the factor that is often focused on in particular.  Given that middle aged is officially 36-59, by the time you are 42 you cannot even pretend to be ‘exciting’.  Ironically, of course, they do not really want a 24-hour party person as a lodger, they want someone who is not seen or heard, leaves nothing in the fridge and manages never to be in the bathroom when they want to use it.  However, that is not what they think they want, certainly at the processing stage.

Having learnt these lessons, I adopted an approach which I repeated this time on coming to London.  Instead of chasing after advertisements only to get rejection after rejection, I put out a ‘wanted’ advertisement (using Gumtree London), detailing my age, gender, the profession I work in (something else people get exercised about, by definition civil servants certainly are seen as insufficiently ‘exciting’), what child and/or animal combinations I could tolerate and how far from work I was willing to be (even so, I always get offers 20-40Km from where I will be working, pretty much defeating the purpose).  Anyway, this has saved me a lot of wasted phonecalls. 

This time, however, I encountered a problem for the first time, the one which forms the focus of this posting.  All of us are aware that 90% of the emails we receive are not only junk but are, in fact, trying either to trick us into revealing details in order to hack into accounts or to trick money directly from us.  Such scams are often categorised as ‘419 scams’ a reference to the number of the Nigerian law which covers such criminal activity.  Once Nigeria was a major centre for such scams, but now it has spread to many other countries and many originate from within the UK itself.  Such scams constantly evolving; Wikipedia even has a whole page devoted to them.  We have seen the move away from those based on traditional confidence tricks such as trying to persuade you to part with a certain sum of money in return for a share of a larger sum.  Many now purport to be from banks or other online services you may or may not use, in order to tackle some supposed fault.  The ever changing variety of scams has now reached looking for rooms to rent.

I posted my advertisement twice in the space of a fortnight and among the eight responses I received, three were scams.  This might not seem a great deal, but when the supply of rooms is so scarce, this is three wasted opportunities.  The scams I received fell into two categories.  The first type may have even been computer generated.  The two messages came from a German Yahoo email account.  The first one suggested a room quite far from where I was working and I realised the sender had taken the area I stated I was interested in as the name of a street elsewhere in London and sent me a room available in that street.  The house holding the room was number 32.  I rejected that room straight off, saying it was too far away.

I only realised that this message was a scam when I altered my advertisement for inclusion the second week.  I got another email from a German Yahoo account, but using a different name and with an address close to where I work; it was only later that I noticed it was in house numbered 32.  What struck me, however, was that the photographs of the room were identical to those I had been sent before and then I saw the number was the same.  Looking back, I should have been suspicious immediately as the facilities on offer are far better than the standard for rooms right across London and the monthly rent was slightly below the norm.  In addition, in the emails they asked very quickly for details about me, whereas, as I have explained above, I had included a lot of personal detail in my original advertisement.  Given that both emails followed the same pattern, generating a response with a real address based on the area requested in my advertisement (though mixing up the area and street name in the first case), suggests to me that there is mechanical scamming going on.

The second scam was certainly with a human who I ended up in correspondence with.  Again, the facilities were slightly better and the rent slightly less than the norm for the area.  In addition, he would not give the name of the street the room was in though he sent photos of the interior.  Another noticeable characteristic was that after the initial email the level of English grammar and spelling fell away quickly.  Though, having dealt with officials from Newham Council over many years, I do know that this is not a great sign, because most communications I received from the council were more poorly written than the average scam email, as I often told them.  The Newham council worker Deanna Banks, has an unfortunate name for avoiding being suspected as a scammer, but the fact that she seems unable to use capital letters does not help either.

What aroused my slow to arouse suspicions was the story this scammer began spinning.  He said how he had people coming to the room and loving it so that he took it off the market only to find ultimately they could not pay the rent.  I offered to show him my current bank statement but he said he had been tricked in that way before.  I even offered to pay him a deposit of £200 in cash on the day I saw the room, if I liked it.  When he refused this and went on in detail about how I had to send money to my girlfriend using Western Union and then show him the receipt, I knew it was a scam.  Internet pages say that any transaction which involves Western Union should be avoided; they seem to only function on business done for scams.  Other money transfer companies are available and seem similarly exploited by scammers.

It was only some weeks after I had sent abuse to these scammers that I read in ‘The Guardian’ that scams around renting rooms have become so common and I recognised one of the ones listed as being the second one tried on me.  By definition someone seeking to rent just a room as a lodger is not rich, but these scammers are going to try to steal from you all the same.  The difficulties that people actually renting rooms put in place just drives you all the quicker into the arms of the scammers.  I was angered by how much time was wasted and how my hopes were raised and dashed.  I do also wonder about the poor people whose addresses get used by the scammers.  I guess at least some of them have had distraught people turning up at their door assuming that they are somehow connected with the scam, when in fact they have been just as exploited as the potential lodgers themselves.

Property In The UK 11: Squeezing Out A Little Bit More

The house I live in has been on the market since September 2010.  Not a good time to be selling a house, but as regular readers know, I have never been lucky with property.  If it were not for HM Revenue & Customs admitting to overcharging me £16,000 worth of tax in 2008 and refunding it (with no apology) then, by now the house would have been repossessed.  I have been unemployed for 11 months, bar six weeks' of a few days of work (some weeks one day, some two days per week) and despite still having regular interviews I seem no closer to getting back into employment.  Consequently, because of the woman who lives in my house running a business I am not entitled to any benefit to pay the mortgage.  The mortgage lender, Nationwide Building Society, has repeatedly refused to discuss my inability to pay, saying that if I have enough to pay at least one month's mortgage payments, then it is too early to discuss me defaulting or going on to interest only payments.  With unemployment rising and despite 27 interviews now, no sign of work, the only option is to sell the house.  Of course, that is easier said than done.

I acknowledge that I am very bad at selecting companies to provide me a service.  I always pick the worst company available (though on a number of occasions, recommended to me) for the particular job.  Consequently I have been ripped off by letting agents, removal companies, electrical repair companies and now estate agents.  Within a five-minute walk of my house there are at least five estate agents, though the best decided to morph instead into a financial advice company, much to my frustration and the company they recommended nearby only lets, not sells properties.  Consequently I picked a large company close to my house that was tied into national networks so as to get the coverage.  However, the staff turned out to be clueless, making no effort to learn about the neighbourhood (even though you can see their office from my house) or the potential buyers coming round and what they were looking for (buy-to-let, buy-for-family, buy-for-self; elderly, middle aged, young; with/out children; local, from London, etc.) and said nothing bar 'this is the living room'.  They had the cheek to say they would no longer do accompanied viewings because I simply took over the sales role.  I said that was insulting as I had only taken that role because their staff made no effort to address the viewers or sell the property.  Anyway, we got one buyer from them, but it took him three months and he had not even sent round a surveyor.  We abandoned both him and the estate agent.

The next company we went for, is tiny, but works incredibly hard and within a week of transferring to them we have another buyer, offering £2000 more than the first.  I live in a town with still high demand for property, very close to a good range of shops and good primary schools.  Despite paying £240,000 for the house in 2007 it is now worth £230,000; to be expected with the downturn in the market.  Offers have come in starting at £205,000, not leaving enough to clear the debts on the house and have enough to put down a deposit on a rented property.  We have managed to get offers now up to £217,000 helped by the move from Winter to Spring, but still in line for a heavy loss.  Given the location and the benefits of the property, once the economy recovers, the value is likely to rise fast, especially with the revival of buy-to-let mortgages reported this week.  Thus, the person is getting a good deal on the property, £13,000 less than the valuation given even now by the estate agents.

These days, it is apparent, that a good deal is not enough for house buyers, they constantly want to squeeze out more from the seller.  I have experienced this even back in 2007 selling my flat in London, a time when the housing market was much healthier.  Due to being bullied by the landlord's representative, I effectively sold a two-bedroomed flat for the price of a one-bedroomed flat in the area of Newham.  It was clean and modern and I had replaced the bathroom and the windows and made other improvements in the six years I had owned it, primarily for my own benefit when living there, but clearly improving it over some of the neighbouring flats.  In my hurry, the buyer got a very good bargain.  However, this was not enough.  Living in rented accommodation I had no desire to move the furniture and white goods from it.  This was initially not an issue, but then suddenly the buyer wanted them gone at my expense.  Then he wanted the flat to be cleaned, by him even before he owned it, at a cost of £500 (€565; US$805).  The flat was not unclean and it took £40 to employ a woman to clean it thoroughly.  However, it was clear the buyer was using it as an excuse to squeeze more money for me, even though he was paying about £30,000 (€33,900; US$48,300) less than an equivalent flat in the same area would have cost him.  Once the front door lock had been destroyed by the estate agents' carelessness on the day before the contract exchange occurred, I took the opportunity while it was being replaced to ensure that the buyer would receive a welcoming gift of rotten milk, a mouldy fridge and faeces when he arrived.  Any waste paper and other rubbish I could find, was distributed over the flat so he could really see what an untidied flat looked like.  As you can understand, I was angered, by the attempt to squeeze more and more from me, even when I was selling the place at a bargain price.

A very similar thing occurred with the current house.  The second buyer we accepted first sent around three inspectors.  The surveyor spent three hours at the property and people came to check the central heating and electricity too.  This dragged out over a couple of weeks.  The buyer did not take efforts to conceal her contempt for us and I overheard her ridiculing myself and the woman who lives in our house as stupid.  Clearly she, like the buyer of my flat, believed that we were so desperate that she could humiliate us and we would have to swallow it.  I have no idea why humiliation is now seen to be a necessary part of buying a house.  Certainly getting an extra £500 from the buyer now seems to be part of a fashion.  In this case she did not demand cleaning, she asked instead that we paid £500 towards the £1000 it would cost to build an additional wall around the kitchen; a wall that we would gain no benefit from.  We naturally refused.  The estate agent felt the demand was ridiculous, which suggests that it may not be as common behaviour as I have experienced, but he did offer to take £500 off his commission instead.  The woman, disgruntled with our refusal to comply with us immediately withdrew her offer, over two months since she had made it, and like the first buyer, during that time, had effectively blocked other potential buyers.

These may be isolated incidents, but to me there does seem to be a trend that, as a buyer you see what you can squeeze out of the sellers.  Getting a good price is not enough.  There has to be some specific demand imposed on the sellers to make it clear to them that you hold the power.  To me this does not seem to be a healthy way to do business.  Either you want the property or you do not.  Either you can afford to buy the property or you cannot.  There is obviously room for discussion over the price and we have engaged with that, all the buyers (we are now on to the third, who rather worryingly has requested a third viewing of the house as I have been writing this) have got a price well below the asking price.  When seeing Niall Ferguson talking about the success of Western capitalism and how now it is not thriving so well as it is in China, he noted the fact that honesty in business is one trait highly valued in Chinese commerce.  This element seems to have gone from buying and selling in the UK and slows down exchange and discourages commerce.  This applies to selling on eBay in the UK as it does to selling houses.  Sometime in the previous decade, perhaps prompted by television programmes, buyers have been encouraged to move from simply getting a good deal, to squeezing unnecessary extras.  After all, on a £217,000 sale, the commission to the estate agent is usually £4880 and unless the buyer if a first-time buyer the Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) is £2,170, so what is the fuss over £500?  It seems to be a principle that Ferguson missed that is damaging to capitalism in the UK today.  It is not enough simply to make a profitable deal, now you have to 'win a victory' too and rub the face of your 'opponent' in the mud by asserting how much more economically powerful you are than them.  This is one thing which harms sales and business in the UK and seems to be increasing as the recession widens the gap between people who previously would have been on the same economic level.  Selling your house should not require you to kow-tow to someone who explicitly holds you in contempt.

P.P. 28/05/2011
This aspect of the house sale has taken on an additional unpleasant twist.  It is clear that I have a sign on my forehead that I cannot see but which instructs everyone else: 'patronise and exploit this man as much as you can'.  Last week I was fortunate enough to get work.  This means there is no longer a need to sell the house, though we will struggle with paying the mortgage until my first salary arrives at the end of July.  However, given that the house is worth tens of thousands of pounds less than when we bought it and we own 1/300th of it more, every month of the mortgage we pay, if we can hold on to it until prices have at least returned to their 2007 level, then we will at least be a little better off.

Once the job had been confirmed, I telephoned the estate agent to tell him we were taking the house off the market.  I said I expected an invoice for services rendered in the four months they had been selling our house for us.  I assumed he would inform all the relevant parties.  Today, however, I received a very snotty letter from the solicitors' office, asking why they had not been informed as well.  It was clear they had found out in two days of me telling the estate agent anyway, but that I did not crawl round to them and kiss their feet and apologise for not continuing with the sale, was clearly sufficient to leave them indignant.  They were not our choice of solicitors anyway, we only took them as they are the ones the estate agent uses.  All our communications, bar one visit, have been through the estate agent.  Given their attitude now, I am actually glad I did not call them.

It gets worse.  When our second buyer decided that because we were unwilling to pay her £500 and have a wall built to no benefit of us, she would break off the sale, we were left with the solicitor's charge for the work they had done already, a sum of £300 [€318; US$483].  We contacted the buyer to see if she would reimburse us this money.  She did not say no, she simply refused to respond to any attempts to contact her.  We accepted that with no written contract we could not get the money out of her.  Now, however, this time we have broken the sale and now this latest buyer is trying to get his solicitor's fees back out of us.  Despite being employed by us, our solicitor seems always to be working on behalf of other people.  In the first case she did nothing to help us recoup the money from the buyer who broke off.  In this second case, however, she has forwarded a bill from the buyer's solicitor, at a cost of £8 to us, and written to tell us it is 'only fair' that we reimburse the buyer.  Why is it 'fair' that we have to pay the fees for everyone?  The solicitor seems to have no interest in aiding us, despite being paid by us, at fees £66 higher than those levied by the latest buyer's solicitor.

Part of the problem seems to be that we are too honest and treat people politely.  In contrast the two buyers have behaved in a 'chav-plus' manner.  They behave as if thuggish, self-centred people from a housing estate, terse and rude in their manners, expecting always to get that bit extra, and yet, they have the money to speculate in property.  I could be terse and aggressive in my business dealings, put on the accent and behaviour I learnt in Mile End and it is apparent in not doing so I somehow signal that I am open to being exploited by all and sundry.  My advice is: the only way to go into buying or selling a house in the UK in 2011 is to behave as if you are some small-time gangster who has retired from the Ocean Estate in Stepney to Chigwell.  In addition, avoid Aldridge Brownlee solicitors.