How I bought a slum for half a million
Lloyd Evans is aghast at his decision, in less than six minutes, to buy a tiny home that he and his wife admit is ugly and overpriced It was pretty barmy ten years ago but now it’s downright insane. When I last dabbled in the London property market, prices were rocketing and there were half a dozen buyers for every property. These days it’s a whole lot worse but I’ve got no choice. My wife and I have a toddler nearing his first birthday and it’s becoming impossible to lug everything up the 58 steps to our topfloor flat: baby, toys, pushchair, Cow & Gate formula, books, food, wine, beer. And it’s really not healthy. I could easily have a heart attack watching her doing all that carrying.
Our home, in which I’m writing this piece, went on sale just after Christmas. We chose a swanky top-end estate agent, (‘We charge you the earth — for a very small piece of it’), calculating that they’d attract the kind of City high-flyers who’d be seduced by the look of our warehousestyle flat with its big airy spaces, pockmarked brickwork, chrome sink and all that cobblers. It worked. Within a week we’d sold for ‘the full asking’ as our charming negotiator put it. Tally ho. It was time to go house-hunting.
The London market is so overheated right now that new properties are like movie stars. You have to make an appointment just to get a glimpse of them. Blockviewings are scheduled for Saturday mornings, when ten or more hopefuls are given a quarter of an hour each to scoot around their future dream-home. There’s barely time to take off your shoes, charge up the beige stair-carpet, whisk around each of the bedrooms, one, two, three, tap your knuckles authoritatively on a random piece of plasterwork (yes, we all do it) and peer into next door’s garden to check for freshly dug graves. Having ascertained that a) the house will withstand a light westerly breeze and b) the neighbour isn’t a serial killer, you’re hustled out into the street just as the next set of buyers are taking off their shoes and leaving them on the doormat. If you’re interested, you phone the agent immediately to accept the seller’s asking price. Forget haggling. If you can’t stump up every last penny you’ll get tittered at politely down the phone.
It doesn’t end there. Once the agent has hooked a fistful of punters, he starts an auction involving ‘sealed’ bids. This covert method suits everyone — except the buyer. If your bid is accepted, you’ll be left with the niggling doubt that you paid five or ten grand more than necessary for your house.
Having lost out on several secret auctions, we were soon feeling exhausted. Dream-home fatigue loured over us. Then we got lucky. An estate agent promised us an exclusive preview of a tiny three-bedroom house in the East End. Like most modern buyers, we want everything to be ‘original’ (apart from our taste, which we’re happy to be wholly derivative). We were after a mixture of old and new. And here it was. Marble fireplaces, Victorian doors, period windows, antique floorboards. New roof, new plasterwork, the latest loo, a gleaming white bathroom and a freshly installed kitchen. Well, we didn’t actually see the kitchen. The owner kept two psychotic terriers in there so the agent led us up to the door and we peered in through the glass panels while the hysterical dogs leapt and clawed at the bounds of their prison. The kitchen looked OK. A bit dark and marmorial, perhaps, but it was February.
We trotted upstairs and had a quick shuttle around the white, bright little bedrooms, which bore the familiar aroma of Thompson’s Stain Blocking Damp Seal. Through a rear window I glanced down at the ‘compact’ garden, a sort of Danzig corridor of cracked paving stones just large enough to accommodate a toddler with a skipping rope as long as he didn’t want to do any actual skipping. The agent apologised, explaining that the house had been squeezed into a plot intended for more ample homes.
We came downstairs and shared our thoughts. ‘It’s perfect,’ said my wife extracting her heel from inside a stair-rod. ‘Just what we want,’ I concurred, striding masterfully across the knocked-through sitting-room and nearly bashing my head against a flea-market chandelier. ‘Good, I’ll just pop your details down,’ said the agent, deftly producing a biro while aquaplaning towards the stripped-pine table. We’d been in this house less than six minutes and we’d bought it. Amazing. I’ve been on Dodgem rides that were shorter than that. But the Dodgems don’t cost half a million quid. Then again, we had absolutely no choice. If we hadn’t stuck our hands in the air the house would have been snapped up by lunchtime.
For ages nothing happened. We popped back for a second viewing and this time the house seemed completely different. The bathroom looked like an abattoir, the bedrooms felt poky and characterless and even the garden seemed to have shrunk. Standing for the first time in our new kitchen, my wife shook her head stoically. ‘This has got to go. It’ll make me depressed.’ I agreed. ‘Yeah, I don’t like black marble worktops either.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘the whole kitchen.’ We trooped miserably home, unsure what to do. Then, out of the blue, our buyers threw us a lifeline. They demanded a ten grand discount on our flat. What glorious fools! We were cock-a-hoop. Our place had soared by more than ten grand in the two months since we’d accepted their offer. We would turn them down, they would withdraw, and we could resume our search in the warmer, brighter days of April. We left our swanky estate agent to unravel the mess while we cracked open some wine and breathed a huge sigh of relief.
A couple of days later, our buyers restored their original offer. The deal was back on. We had now placed ourselves in a spectacularly idiotic position. We were about to buy a house which we had openly described to ourselves (yes, and to all our friends too) as an ugly, overpriced slum with a garden the size of a window box. Our only option now was to collapse the deal ourselves, dole out a small fortune in cancellation fees and start all over again. But what for? We’d almost certainly end up buying another ugly, overpriced slum with a garden the size of a French stick.
So it’s happening. We’re moving next Monday. Of course, we’re grateful we’ve got somewhere to live. And in theory we’re halfway to being millionaires. Yet we don’t have a car, we can barely afford a holiday, and when we go for a drink we sit on the green outside the pub quaffing Tesco £2.99 Frascati to save money. It’s a strange feeling and I doubt if we’re the only ones. We’ve never been so rich and yet we’ve never felt so skint.
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