Tuesday 14 July 2009

HEADS UP!

At long last ... we have bought a house!


It has not been for lack of trying! Oh my ... I could write a book on dealing with estate agents! We put in an offer for a house and it was accepted yesterday. Leaning very much on Mairi we pulled out all the stops to go for this 1950's bungalow in Milngavie. It needs a lot of work! What is it they say? ... 'requires renovation'!

The hard part was getting the property. For us, it is location, location, location. (We want to be near the family.) The rest - I am convinced - is downhill. (Having built our own house from scratch 40 years ago we are up for on-site activity again!)

Are property prices falling? Maybe somewhere, but not here. I guess we are talking middle class suburbs adjacent to all the amenities. Yes, there is plenty on the net for sale. (Tell me, what do people do who do not use the internet?!) I could write screeds on these internet property sites - much of it good (photos etc), but bits of it definitely sloppy.

And then there is the culture of buying and selling property. It is different in every country, e.g. Scotland and England. And certainly it is different between Scotland and Canada.

Alastair's advice was "take your estate agent out for lunch"! Ha! If they are in the office (and many are part-time) let us just say that their 'services' are not of the lunch-time cultivation type!

Later: Ho, ho! See Mairi's comment below, i.e. click on |COMMENT.

2 comments:

mairi albiston said...

Or how about 'It is recommended that you check that your estate agent is not out to lunch'

Vagabonde said...

Congratulations on being a new owner. Will you move from your current house or is this a second home? The thought of buying another house is scary to me, not the buying fact, but the moving fact – we have accumulated so much stuff since we purchased this house in 1976! It would take months to go through it all, and the books! We have a few thousand books – they are so heavy to move.