Love thy neighbour..

How are your neighbours? Interesting question, isn't it? One that will inspire some of us to clench our fists and grind our teeth muttering expletives under our breath. As is the case with our friends Fran and Reggie we visited today. Their neighbours of three years are enthusiastic DIYers and have been at it nearly every weekend for the past three years as they both have full time jobs. They also have two kids complete with their own quantity of associated noise.

Fact of the matter is most of us cannot and will not ever escape having neighbours. Now if you are lucky, you either have none (hurray!) or you get on with them very well. At the other end of the scale, we have the poor people that live in appartments, high rise buildings, surrounded by neighbours on all sides and those whose relationship with their neighbour could only be defined as a temporary stalemate (or more like a ceasefire in some cases..) We only have to turn to the news to find plenty of examples about how wrong it can all go but aren't we forgetting one fundamental thing here? Aren't we all human, in the same boat and trying to get on and live our lives in relative peace? 

As the World has grown faster and louder so our control over our private world inside our homes has gained importance. This is where we retreat form the hustle and bustle, where we are the masters and nobody should dare interfere. 'An Englishman's home is his castle' the saying goes. Nice and good and were it only so, as castles have seriously thick walls (think feet rather than inches) and noise then is rarely an issue. I can't really imagine any castle owner even realizing their neighbour was doing a bit of DIY in fact next door's cannon practice would most likely be identified as distant thunder. The reality however consists more often than not of badly built partition walls and un-insulated floors (not really put up with peace and quiet in mind) rather than foot thick piles of rock.

What to do about forced coexistence? Should we be tolerant or should we arm for war? The answer is not clearcut as in some cases the opposing party might simply not have the intellectual muscle or the altruism, nor the empathy required for enlightened coexistence. Best we can do is get on with it, be the neighbour we would like to have and don't rise to the challenge. Don't forget that our freedom to do whatever we want ends where our neighbours freedom begins (and vice versa)and all too often we are taking away someone else's freedom in the exercise of our own.

To make a case in point, imagine next door wakes you up with an almighty crashing and banging in the middle of the night followed by some shouting and screaming, now you can let that put your nose out and start retaliating by banging on the wall or slamming the door or turning up the music and leaving the house next Sunday and no doubt such behaviour would have an effect although it might not be the one you really want (well next door would most likely be annoyed and that might make you feel better but they might also respond in kind which might make you feel worse).

Turn the whole scenario around and presume you get up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night. On the way you trip up and fall down the stairs spraining your ankle. You can't get up and despite the noise and your swearing your partner is still fast asleep and you have to shout to wake him. Your ankle turns out to be broken and you get a couple of weeks home sick which turn out to be not very relaxing because for some reason next door has taken to slamming the doors and banging on the wall at the slightest sound... Get the point?

I suppose this is turning into quite the Christian message of 'love thy neighbour' and 'turn the other cheek' but whatever problems there are with organized religion the philosophical precepts are common sense.

As for Fran and Reggie, well they have bought a yurt which they put up on the parents' farm and where they spend their weekends away from it all, hoping that they will return one Sunday evening to find next door have moved out!

And finally I bet you want to ask me: 'How are your neighbours?' - Well, one lot has two noisy babies and they have lost the power of coherent speech, all we can hear is ooohing and cooing and when we see them out and about the town they always look a bit sleep deprived and ill and the other one has a bad habit of slamming doors and can be a bit of a dick, I can't wait for us to move!

On agents and houses..

Buying a house is as nerve wracking an affair as is selling one. We have seen a great deal of houses this year and dealt with a lot of estate agents and it struck me that here you have a substrata of humanity that has carved out an existence between two groups of potentially permanently stressed people. One would think that it takes a very special kind of person and indeed as one of them put it 'You can't help but it (your buisness - ed.) rubbing off on you..'

So here we have someone stuck between people wanting to make money and people wanting to make a bargain, someone who puts himself professionally between a rock and a hard place trying to convince the rock that the place is actually just hard enough and trying to convince the place of the rock's malleability.

 This refers to personal dealings with the agents, looking at property advertizing we have a completely different picture, suddenly this professional tightrope walker with well honed negotiating skills (well the better ones anyway..) turns into a clumsy daydreaming simpleton, forgetting to mention things like road proximity, cutting off the attached neighbours house (complete with car wrecks and caravan in the front yard) on the photo, accidentally taking a picture of the council lawn abutting the garden and getting utterly perplexed by the digital camera's image settings and ending up with pictures grossly stretched out of proportion. I can only imagine that the initial visit of a property puts our agent in a sort of rabbit in the headlights stupor, making him (or her) completely unable to complete even the most basic of tasks. We can see this by the verbal descriptions subsequently put together when the poor soul gets back to the office, here the council estate becomes a 'sought after area', the main road two steps from the front door becomes 'good access' and the DIY hell becomes 'benefitting from considerable updating by previous owner', any room 1,90m by 1,40m becomes a double bedroom, every broom cupboard a pantry and every garden shed a workshop/office. Then of course there is the delirious visions of extensions, conversions and great potential (subject to planning of course) so that by the end of it all most of the agents must find it hard to recall anything accurate about a property at all.

This does not bode well for our buyer or seller, it is in fact a bit like going sledging, blindfolded, at night, down a wooded mountainside, in the middle of an avalanche, with all your money tied to the back with a old bit of string.. Ok so that might be exaggerating a bit but I was quite enjoying that metaphor but the sweat soaked moments where you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night wondering whether you are doing the right thing might well make you feel like you are on that sledge.

So getting back to our agents, it is no small wonder then that the profession is filled with a right motley crew of characters. Ranging from the guy that only takes on properties he knows will sell at the asking price or above, so cocksure of himself he doesn't mind telling you that the original owners committed sucide there.. Then there is the agent complete with office junior prancing about like the wreck he is showing off will sell by itself or the agent discovering the house with you 'Oh, I've never been here before so I don't know what to expect' followed by hugely exaggerated wide eyed oohs and aahs as they make their way around the house.

Some are very quiet, too quiet so that when one subjects them to careful questioning suddenly they remember the problem with the drains, the right of way across the back lawn, the footpath on the migration route from the school to the local shops or half the garden being rented of the local council not to forget he total chauvinist, gold ringed, tanned, arrogant and racist to boot, an office staffed by blondes young enough to be his daughter that he slobberingly leeres at and behaving as though being careful with your money and trying to get the best deal possible is a personal insult. Best avoid him.

It must indeed be a very hard profession to be in, some of these agents, started in the glory days where the world was full of fast bucks and the buildings from the housing boom were not yet falling apart, seem to spend quite some time over lunch trying to forget the harsher times they have arrived in, so preoccupied and sometimes inibriated are they that they completely forget their lines and statements like 'We have had quite a few offers' and 'It's been on the market for a while but I have/had 2 more showings this week' then slip out randomly and completely out of context.

How to conclude this rant (as that is what this seems the little post about stress involved in buying a house has turned into..)?

• There are a few pointers I would give to anyone finding themselves at this juncture, if you think you might want to buy, you should have started looking and going to look at houses yesterday. Go and see as many as you can that way you get a feel for properties and the market as well as getting used to estate agents and their ways. 

• Seeing houses with the owners is a tough one, always compliment them on how nice they have the place, never commit to anything, don't get their hopes up in vain and never ever discuss changes or building work you might have in mind with them (they might not want to sell to someone that is going to 'tear apart' their home). 

• Take along a friend or colleague (don't go to see properties on your own) and make sure they chat to the agent while you have a good look around (an overly chatty agent might well be trying to distract you attention from details that would make the property unsuitable for you). 

• Try your best to avoid group showings, ask if there will be other people seeing the property before or after you and be late or leave early accordingly as agents try to group viewings like that to make it seem like there is greater interest than there really is. 

• If the agent does not accompany you into the house then it most likely is as good as sold already and seeing it will be a waste of time (apart from practice). 

• Don't ever let the agent know how much (or little) money you have be vague about the price range you want to look at (they will always try and get you to spend more otherwise). 

• Don't be afraid to make offers, in fact I would go as far as recommending you to practice making offers (in the UK if you make a formal offer the agent has to put it to the seller) and it takes the stress out of it, we had great fun making very cheeky offers on overpriced properties we liked and wanted (try some between 30% and 50% off the asking price) When it came to the crunch we had an offer of 20% below asking accepted, if we hadn't practiced we would have never dared making that offer. 

• Read up on your rights, the sellers rights and the agents obligations, that way you know exactly where you stand and no agent can bully you into offering more or moving faster than caution dictates. 

• Don't fall in love with places this only leads to stress and heartache. Always tell yourself that if you don't get the property you want at that moment, another one will show up, also remember that if it seems too good to be true it probably is. 

All this will make sense if you practice looking and dealing with agents, looking at properties and making offers for slightly less than the asking price not what the agent/owner thinks it is worth or might be worth. After all a house for £200k that would be worth £250k with a new kitchen/bathroom etc is still only a house worth £200k needing a lot of work and the hassle of that has to be factored into the price, a house that would be worth £ Xk if it where somewhere else is not somewhere else.. So many things and factors go into doing this that a complete guide as to how would be futile but practice will train your instinct and help you make the right choices so last of all remember that you always have a choice!

PS: One tip I almost forgot was don't buy anything you would not be able to sell again, this one helps keeping an objective head when trying to come to a dcecision.