Name changed as this is soooooooo outing...
I’m a first time buyer and viewed a property today on a development that is less than 20 years old. There have been several houses recently sold on the development and a few more still for sale, it’s a nice area popular with naice families and retired folks.
The house I viewed today has been on the market for a long time and is vacant and appears to have been vacant for quite some time. It is on the market with three estate agent and has three boards outside it. It is realistically priced and needs nothing at all major doing to it (except a significant area of carpet replaced which I’ll explain later). It’s probably even up for less than market value since all the bedrooms have high spec good quality fitted furniture and nice made to measure curtains and blinds unlike other houses in the development that are up for £10k more.
On looking at the history of the house, it was bought over a year ago and put back on the market for less than it was bought for under 5 months later. The Estate Agent said that it’s in the hands of a company and also, curiously a small but still significantish amount of the deposit is already paid if we wished to buy?!
Upon viewing today there was a huge mound of mail behind the door, indicating there have been no viewings in a couple of months. An almost identical house two doors away is STC since last Thursday as is one round the corner. The house was immaculate apart from spiders/daddylong legs and the odd cobweb. It had definitely had a very deep clean at some point. It looked like it had been decorated at the time it was last bought back in 2017 but not in the way you would if you were turning around for a quick sale.... ie not typically neutral shades like magnolia etc but two rooms had new glitter feature walls and the lounge had quite ornate, pretty new wall paper on and the kitchen had quite distinctive but lovely new tiles. It really seemed like someone had made a personal choice based on what they wanted, if that makes sense rather than thinking about the rental markers or keeping things neutral for a quick sale. We’ve viewed other homes in the development and this one was much more nicely decorated, even than those that have recently sold there for more than the asking price of this one.
So here is where it starts to get creepy...
Throughout the majority of the house the carpet was cream and was one of the only things that needed replaced as it was quite old. In the lounge there was a thick, darker coloured carpet that was brand new and, from the pile, it was clear no-one has lived in there and there has been no furniture on it since the carpet was installed. The stairs of the house are in the lounge and have the same new carpet. Everywhere else, it’s still the old cream stuff.
The person I was viewing with opened the cupboard under the stairs and my first thought was, “how odd! A random red carpet under the stairs, why didn’t they just continue the new lounge carpet in there?” and then the person I with went pale and said to the EA “Excuse me, that’s not blood is it?!” At that point I looked right into the cupboard and saw that, in fact, the old cream carpet was in there and there was a HUGE round blood like stain, maybe 45cm diameter, in the cupboard under the stairs, right up to where it joins with the newly replaced carpet in the lounge. The EA sort of laughed it off and said “noooo I’m sure it’s not blood!” but we later looked in the cupboard again before leaving and studied it carefully and it definitely wasn’t anything like red wine or paint or anything obvious, it really did look like a pool of blood.
The garden was really big and over grown and we decided to walk to the bottom of it as there was a gate at the end and we weren’t sure where it led. When we got to the fence at the bottom of the garden there were about five peeping tom holes cut into it!!! They were round, about the size of a 10p piece and at various different “eye level” heights.
I know it’s going to sound weird but before I saw these two things (the possible blood and peepholes) I felt as though the house “felt sad”. I know that sounds really woo but that’s the only way I could describe it. I suppose a lot of long term vacant houses feel a bit like that because they aren’t lived in.
A couple of friends think I’ve just got a very vivid imagination and that the pictures online are gorgeous and I should put an offer in but I feel really uneasy about it. They’ve pointed out, and I sort of agree, that if it is a blood stain in the cupboard, the owners would have replaced the carpet to hide it. But even taking out the possible blood stain...would you think that the other circumstances are a bit too dodgy to consider putting an offer in?