To ask for your worst experiences viewing houses?

[DSHathawayGivesMeFannyGallops]

Please cheer me up! I had the viewing from hell last night; the place was filthy and you could tell the Estate Agent was mortified. Due to other issues, I declined to put in an offer and have other viewings lined up, but I've started to exhaust my area for now and I'm feeling a little jaded.

Please tell me I'm not alone in backing away in horror and tell me all about the worst viewings you've had!

Oh- and I'm not a journo. The Daily Mail can piss off and write their own shitty copy.

Next door neighbour had been murdered and police had closed the street.

Didnt even get in the house

Third bedroom floor to ceiling caged birds...stench, noise and my toddler was hysterical.

This was for rentals but viewed one house. The Estate agent knocked on the door repeatedly, we could hear people inside but they seemed to be rushing about not answering. Eventually the estate agent let us in with her key. The house stank of weed and the tenants just started burning some incense over the top. One of the bedrooms was barely furnished just had a bed with no sheets or bedding and a person asleep face down on it.

Another house was just odd. Again tenants didn't open the door. When we finally got in with estate agent's key the place stank of gas. We rushed into the kitchen and the gas was on. Estate agent turned it off and opening the door to the back. Went to fine the tenants and they al looked like zombies - didn't acknowledge that we or the estate agent were there, didn't react when the Estate agent said the kitchen had been full of gas. Very very odd.

We viewed a house where the bathroom was covered in dead flies!! And I mean like hundreds of them!! It was absolutely disgusting, god knows when they last did a viewing! There were dead flies throughout the rest of the house as well on the window sills. It took us about half a year to find somewhere and we had to pull out of two houses we made an offer on. Most stressful thing ever!! But the house we are in now is perfect and I'm so glad we didn't end up getting the other two :)

araiwa that is awful!

One we went to had so many people staying in it and everyone asleep - lumpy outlines of people sleeping in every room (living room etc) and the curtains all closed. Crept about for a few minutes and then realised how stupid it was to do so and left.

I think they felt like they had to let the agents in to do a viewing (it was being rented) but really should have just declined and told them to wait until they’d moved out.

We went to one house where the entire kitchen walls were black with mould. The estate agent kept saying " let me show you the garden"
Er no!

I had a job as estate agent when I was a student and I had some mortifying viewings.

I remember one quite posh couple viewing a house and we were barely through the door when the man did a massive fart and was not even remotely embarrassed. I tried to ignore it but the moment we had moved into another room he did another huge fart. His partner thought it was hilarious and started saying things like 'whoops, better out then in'. He then proceeded to fart about every 30 seconds before I called off the viewing and marched them out the house. They honestly had no idea what they had done wrong.

Another viewing involved opening the door to a second bedroom only to discover it was a sex dungeon with chains hanging off the sealing, a cross, a gym vault horse and a dildo mounted on the wall tbat so big I could only assume it was designed to pleasure an elephant.

Looking for a light airy flat
EA leads me towards a gorgeous period house bathed in sunlight then takes a hard right and goes down some dank steps to a basement flat.
He opens the door and cheerily announces
“Now the first thing you’ll notice about this place is the smell...”

Someone else had a hideous viewing of our rental flat, when they arrived just as I was changing my 8 weeks olds (FF) poonami, in a tiny flat. The stench filled the place. The man of the couple was visibly gagging...

I went to view a lovely house last year, there was a huge stain on the kitchen floor (carpet) which I thought nothing of until the estate agent, who'd been telling us about how the previous owner had owned it since it was built, nervously added that she had actually died in the house and "not to be scared"

Despite her unfortunate choice of words we still put am offer in but somebody else beat us to it.

I went to view a house I found on Rightmove that looked lovely - modern, detached and very reasonably priced. I found the road and was driving up looking at the house numbers. Turned a bend and a huge, ugly abomination of a water tower loomed into view. House numbers got closer and closer, until yep, the house I was viewing was the one directly opposite, literally feet away. I was gutted and the estate agent admitted lots of other people had walked away from the viewings. When I looked back at the photos they'd carefully angled and cropped the photos

Specified to the letting agents that we wanted a light, airy 1/2 bed flat. A great looking one came up within our budget and on an amazing street so we jumped at the chance to view.

What we actually saw was basically a bedsit, with actual bolts on two sets of doors (on the outside ) before we got the top floor to view the flat.
It had a toilet in the kitchen/ living room (no walls... just a toilet in the corner.) The agent then went to show us a 'great sized cupboard' in hall way, which turned out to be a shower hose, inside a non air vented hole in the wall. No actual bathroom anywhere, and the entire thing was about 4mx4m.
Shocking. And because it was london? £1300 a month

Owner clearly had MH issues. Dirty mattress on the floor with no sheets at all. Piles of newspapers in the lounge which you had to weave your way through. Grease in the kitchen you could have written your name in. Rows of 2pint milk containers in the garden, all partially filled with urine (or what looked like urine) and ordered according to how full they were.

There were other issues but those are the ones that stick in my mind twenty years later.

We went to view a house that needed 'some' work. The man who owned the house had died suddenly and his ex-wife had inherited it and wanted rid. I don't think she'd even set eyes on the place. There were dirty plates, empty beer cans, his camp bed was unmade, piles of dusty post on the floor. We couldnt go upstairs because the floor was so rotten. And to top it off we found a recently deceased pigeon crawling with maggots.

It ended up being sold at auction for less than half the price it was listed at.

We viewed one which had those sticky fly killing things handing from the ceiling in every room and every single one was full of dead flies

There was a swastika up on the wall in the kitchen

When we commented on it the estate agent said lots of people had complained and they’d told the people selling to take it down but they refused

Rental property, 3 bed semi. Walked in and instantly hit by a strange but oddly familiar sweet smell. No furniture at all downstairs. Went in kitchen to find several huge pans plus everything needed to mass produce sugar dummies! Boxes of plastic rings, clear plastic wrapping, ribbons etc.

Upstairs there were about 8 metal beds between the 3 rooms with only mattresses. No other furniture.

Sugar dummy sweat shop. We didn't take it because that smell was going nowhere. Covering everything like nicotine.

Visited a house which seemed normal until we saw the framed semi-naked photos (shirt but no knickers) of the owner's wife(?) mounted at intervals on the stairs. A teenage son lived there too, must have been mortifying for him!

Peachyk. Oh my. Is that even legal?

We'd just had a house purchase fall through so we were feeling pretty depressed. A house came up that ticked all our boxes. When we went to view it, the house was in chaos. Total chaos. It was hard to move around the house because it was so messy. Every single surface was covered in stuff. Doors to cupboard couldn't be closed as they were jam packed. Floors covered it stuff so hard not to step on things. And it was filthy.

I just can't get my head round how someone could live it that chaos. I'm not a super tidy person. But this was off the scale. Also how were they not embarrassed having people look around their home.

We made a low offer and told the estate agent that we had doubts about a surveyor's ability to do a survey in that chaos. We also suspected they'd be a nightmare to deal with with paperwork etc.

I’m a relocation consultant so view up to 10 properties a week, these are usually properties with a monthly rent of £1000 or more ( in The North so that’s at the higher end)
I’ve seen some awful sights!

Why on earth would the DM be interested in this boring post?

Wow, nothing that bad, but one had particularly filthy and old-fashioned carpets, absolutely covered in black dog hair. For some bizarre reason, dh asked the owner "what about carpets? Are you leaving them?" And the man said, "well, we could come to some sort of arrangement!!" and I'm just standing there thinking wtaf! dh was obviously disgusted by the carpets too, so no idea why he said that!

I went to view a HA flat with my DB. He'd dreamt of living in this block which is in a lovely quiet location.

Despite being more than he wanted to pay, he nearly accepted it without viewing it but I persuaded him to view it anyway, even if he accepted on the spot.

There was a built-in wardrobe full of an elderly lady's clothing, the filthiest carpets imaginable throughout and, on first entering, there was a mattress stood on it's side in the lounge which had blood splattered on quite a lot of it.

The lady from the HA showing us around also looked shocked at the mattress. She'd expected the flat to have been empty.

We went to view a lovely period house with loads of original features and the lady who owned it was charming. But sadly she smelt so bad that we had to leave - the stench had permeated all the rooms we saw