Expecting buyers to purchase without viewing/survey

[hibbleddible]

Is this genuinely the amount of lunacy that the London property market has descended into, or are the estate agents delusional?

I just had a conversation to this effect with estate agents. I'm a bit flummoxed that anyone would take this much risk.

I live in an area where properties can sell for 20-40% over asking price due to closed bids war and can recall a colleague seeing a fixed price property just having gone on the Internet and bought it without seeing it. She was fed up getting outbid so when she saw something she could actually afford just went for it as it would have been bought by someone else before she had chance to view it

We've bought three times (South, East & Midlands) without a survey and sold once to buyers that didn't have one (South).

In fact we bought a house that we'd not seen the ground floor of - it was a Victorian house that was split into 4 flats in the 60s and the tenant occupying the gff refused entry - although we had viewed one of only two identical houses next door so had a good idea of layout etc. We'd also seen pics from when it was in with an EA. This was a private sale, not an auction purchase.

on with an EA

When I was younger my parents put their house up for sale at 9.30 in the morning, it was sold by 10.15 for well over the asking price. The people did see the house before ex hanged so they could have pulled out but it did still seem crazy.

hibble nope - in both cases she knew which street she wanted to be in and didn't care what state the houses were in as she would be remodelling anyway. One was bought at auction. Both turned out fine - auction house was the one we grew up in, massive 6 bed house, the other house they still live in and have been there 30 years.

That's not normal at all. I'm renting in London and have never rented a property without viewing it first - and nor has any estate agent suggested that we should. Given some of the things that I've seen on viewings, which you wouldn't have known about from the pictures (anything from a horrific smell of damp to collapsed ceilings), there's no way I'd buy or rent anything without viewing first.

Years ago an uncle did buy a house without viewing first, but he's widely known to be completely batty anyway.

We bought our house with no survey, Bank did a mortgage valuation only.
It has been a never ending source of expensive surprises but we don't regret it, a survey wouldn't have told us anything we didn't know unique house, complete moneypit
We did have a good look round though I got lost the layout is mad