Friday, November 10, 2006
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house hunting
Over the past couple of months Mrs. Dunce and I have been on a house-hunting mission. London property is massively overpriced, yet incredibly fast-moving, so it's been quite a frustrating enterprise. We divided up the responsibilities in a very unfair and uneven manner (partly because of differing workloads at the moment, but mainly because of Mrs. Dunce's greater dedication and my own laziness): she was the primary "property finder", regularly searching various online sources, contacting estate agents and setting up viewings; my main job (aside from the occasional secondary property search, providing a second opinion on the "possible" properties, and of course viewings) was that of Primary Negotiator in the event we actually found a place.

Early days were really rough: from the very start we spotted any number of flats and small houses within our budget, and potentially of interest, but every time we rang an estate agent to see about looking at one of them, we heard the same old news: "sorry, it's already under offer". We later learned that properties are selling so quickly that estate agents are hesitant to mail out property information sheets; by the time a sheet arrives in the post, the property will very likely have sold. It was also quite hard for us to arrange viewings: not very many agents were willing to show a property after work, and Saturday appointments were quite hard to come by. But we eventually started to fit a few of them in. Here are some descriptions of the places we got to see (I may be missing a few due to repressed memory of traumatic events)

A ground floor flat in a Victorian (or maybe a little post-Vic) conversion, with the tiniest kitchen I've ever seen. Big enough for one person to stand in, but not enough space to do any sort of actual cooking.

A decent, more recently built (post WW2) ground floor flat, tucked back into the corner of a sort-of-busy street. Nothing was really wrong with this one (Mrs. Dunce sort of liked it), but the front of the building and its street had quite a shabby feel. This one did remain a "maybe we should have" property for quite some time after we decided "no".

Another ground-floor flat in a Victorian conversion. This one had decent bedrooms, kitchen, living room, but the bathroom was a real problem. It was built in a tiny extension, and the ceiling was low enough that I could not stand upright in the shower.

Next, we went to Mrs. Dunce's old student neighborhood (our ideal location, we had sort of decided) to look at a 3-bedroom place. The living area was giant (maybe even too big) and the bedrooms were upstairs (always good--it means less noise from neighbors). But oddly laid out: you had to go through one of the bedrooms to get to another one, the (separate) toilet and bathroom were jammed into a corner next to the kitchen, and the kitchen itself was built in a flat-roofed extension that may have had some dampness issues. We liked it well enough to make an offer, though. And finally it was time for my negotiating skills to shine. We made our offer by phone, and had it rejected on the spot. Mulled it over, called back with another offer, and waited for several days. Turns out someone else bought it for the asking price, which would have been quite a stretch for us given the likely need to do additional work.

A bit more time passed, and we decided to have a look at something very different: a "modern" ex-local authority flat, built in perhaps the early 1960s. It's also sitting right at the edge of a very large, very notorious council estate (but which is in the early stages of a very substantial makeover). We walked inside and loved it. An older lady had been living there for ages, the rooms were all very well proportioned, upstairs bedrooms, etc. The area definitely falls into "not-so-great", in fact, it is listed as "ACORN type 56", the lowest possible ranking on the ACORN scale ("the leading geodemographic tool used to identify and understand the UK population and the demand for products and services". The ACORN scale deserves an entry all its own): As described by upmystreet.com "Many of the people who live in this sort of postcode will live in crowded flats in multi-ethnic areas... 70% of the housing is purpose built blocks of flats. The flats tend to have one or two bedrooms and are rented from the council or housing associations. The large numbers of children living in these small flats make these homes the most overcrowded in the UK.". Or as the ACORN site puts it, "Hard Pressed: Inner City Adversity". But even more concerning than possible poverty and adversity were the signs in the neighbors' windows, giving a comforting message something like "Please don't tear down our homes." We asked the estate agent about this, and he reassured us, telling us that he had spoken to someone from the council, and they were not going to be demolished after all. We weren't convinced and did a little research (we were still interested in possibly making an offer if this statement was true). Mrs. Dunce rang the council and, surprise, surprise, demolition is still on track, planned within the next couple of years. I see that at this very moment the property is still being listed HERE, by Courtneys Estate Agents. Needless to say we did not bother putting in an offer on it. Maybe you would like to. I hear from the agent that demolition has been cancelled.

This last property gave us a different sort of idea: maybe we like the idea of living in an ex-local authority property, where the rooms tend to be of sizes a little more suitable for modern living of the type we prefer to do. So we checked out a couple more of them (in different areas, and definitely offered by different estate agents than the last one). Both had decent-sized rooms, and private gardens, but both of them were set in fairly depressing-looking areas of a vaguely run-down nature. And both were rather shabby, sort of halfway through renovation; I think the owners had started, then run out of time/energy/money.

We were really starting to get depressed, but then it got even worse. First, we saw a recently-developed Victorian conversion, which had been done up to a very nice standard, but which also had very limited space (a second bedroom that would maybe fit a futon, and a nice but very small kitchen, the whole place was small enough that it would take some clever doing to fit a table anywhere but outside). But little did we know that the worst of the lot was yet to come. This was a three-bedroom flat, again of an ex-local authority nature. Mrs. Dunce's extensive research had revealed that this very flat had sold earlier in the year, at a price £30,000 less than the current asking price. We figured someone had bought it, put a little money into it, and was hoping to get a quick profit out of it. Boy, were we wrong. Now, it's somewhat hard to get a sense of space when a place is being occupied by a family of nine (who were present while we were looking at it). And it's somewhat hard to see past crayon-scribbled walls and various bits of who-knows-what flung around the place. But it's definitely easy to see a completely collapsed ceiling in one of the bedrooms, drooping window frames and obvious structural problems, and an ancient, decrepit hot-water boiler that looked like it was ready to blow at any moment (we peeked at the boiler, then gingerly crept backwards as slowly and carefully as we could). When we left we were completely shell-shocked (perhaps latent effects of the first WW2 bomb to land in Tottenham, which destroyed this immediate area). The following days were not happy ones (after all, the asking price was right in the neighborhood of what we thought we could manage).

But the next week, things changed completely. On the Friday just after work we saw an excellent place, on a very nice street (turns out to be ACORN type 15: [not 13 as I originally wrote, but still...]). It has its flaws (chiefly: very narrow bedrooms), but we really liked it (we were also lucky in that we saw it on the very first day it was on the market). We went back the next day, tape measure in hand, to see whether it could work. And it could! We were pretty certain we would make an offer, but we did have another place to see.

And it was back to the very first area we had noticed (and from which all the available properties had sold just the moment we started looking seriously). Definitely a less affluent area, but full of small two-bedroomed houses (originally built as workers' cottages). It was quite nice (though cozy), but we were so dazzled by the previously-mentioned place it stood no chance.

We've now made an offer on the aforementioned place, and it's been accepted, so now we're going through the various painful steps toward finalizing the deal (the less said about any of that, the better. And I've intentionally left out a bunch of details because I don't want to jinx anything). The current owner is hoping to finalize her own new place by the end of January, so we're hoping everything goes smoothly from here on out. I have carefully avoided mentioning specific prices; I'll just say **GULP**.

Oh yeah, during the final decision stage, I did sneak away from work one afternoon to look at one other place that had just come onto the market: a small semi-detached house backing onto a cemetery (Mrs. Dunce's dream, believe it or not). It was in a really village-like cul-de-sac, with loads of mature trees around, and plenty of outdoor space (not even counting the cemetery which I am sure would have been a real treat for the cat). Unfortunately it required a lot of work (holes in the floor, possible structural problems, just about everything inside would need replacing), and since my DIY skills are limited to changing light bulbs and vacuuming, I thought it was definitely not for us.

Friday, November 10, 2006 2:36:33 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [1]  |