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.

maps.app.goo.gl/8XSPmP4tiJPeyNx57

This is a highly sought after area according to my sister. Don't fancy that in my front garden!

Oh Buddy, that is heartbreaking. What a shock.

We looked at a very normal looking house in a pretty average estate in our really quite nice Home Counties town and it had been subdivided up with chipboard and there were loads and loads of people living there, in pretty grim conditions. One of the bedrooms was locked and when we knocked on the door one of the guys in there got really aggressive. We were looking around on our own and the estate agent hadn’t mentioned anything about this - which we thought was a bit rubbish of them. My DH is a big lad and not easily scared, but even he was shaken afterwards. Then was another very very lovely house owned by a very lovely retired couple - but they had a terrifying room full of dolls!

Viewed a wonderful Georgian house. Just what we were looking for, except for the stench from the sewage works opposite. Twenty years later the problem has not been solved. We didn't buy...

I went with a friend to view a house that had belonged to an elderly party, now deceased. He had clearly been confined to the ground floor for the last few years of his life. It was OK down there, a few sticks of furniture still about and the shower looked clean enough. We were shown round by the EA, who told us the grandson was the vendor. She was impressed by the new blackout blinds fitted upstairs but I was troubled by the signs of damp round the landing window. And then there were power points everywhere in the bedrooms. Dozens of them. EA thought they must have been running a call centre but it dawned on me later that while granddad led his blameless life downstairs they'd actually been growing cannabis upstairs.

This thread reminded me of this blog (now a book too, I believe):
terriblerealestateagentphotos.com/

Tarantula in open tank, dog shit everywhere.

We viewed a rental where we woke up the current tenant while we were there. She was a medical student working nights and had told the landlord they could show the place while she still lived there provided they called and confirmed it was OK beforehand, because she might be sleeping. The estate agent had called but when he got no response he'd assumed she was at work so brought us round. The tenant demanded her key back on the spot and told him she wouldn't grant any further permission to view until the end of her tenancy. We dropped the estate agent too as who wants to rent through somewhere that will have so little respect for you as a tenant?

Saw some shockingly poor quality places when I was a student - mold, hallways labeled as bedrooms, doors that had been kicked in and then poorly patched up with flimsy board, underwear and sex toys strewn around - but we were looking at stuff that was v. cheap.

Currently looking. Went to see a house recently and the woman was absolutely lovely and clearly loved her home but then when got to one room that had straw on the floor which she didn’t acknowledge and when we asked about it she just paused, looked at us blankly and then carried on.
Got to the garden and her husband was sitting in a full Spider-Man costume drinking a beer and didn’t acknowledge us.
It was... odd

We has a second veiwing on a house when we were relocating to another city with my son who was 2.5 at the time, this was a couple of years ago now. Both me and my husband both had a sick feeling in our tummy’s at the unusual interest that the vendors showed in our little boy - I couldn’t shake off this feeling that something was wrong and wanted to leave. The feeling was something I had never experienced and haven’t since.... they followed up a week or so later with an odd email inviting my little boy to thier house for dinner. Still gives me the creeps. Didn’t buy the house for a variety of reasons including this one.

The worst one was the house that had a pond built into the living room floor!! Koi fish swimming around too

My parents rented a house with a fish pond in the middle of the living room when I was a child! No koi though - we had Siamese fighting fish and those little ones that look like they are lit with neon.

@AdobeWanKenobi, For most of them, they'd presumably climbed down the steps and taken the photos at close range (one, they must have slid down the slope and sat in the mud to take it). For the maisonette, they'd cropped out the external steps and presented a photo of the well kept downstairs flat as though that was the entrance to the 'house'. For the tower block, it was a photo of the Victorian Terrace round the corner and, for the crackhouse, it was a photo from when it was last sold.

They're like bloody employment agencies advertising jobs that don't exist so they can harvest your CV details. Bloody hate them.

1 EA told us it was a "spacious 2 bed with 2 reception rooms"
It was actually a tiny living room where the sofa was right up against the TV cabinet, which was tiny, a kitchen which had two cupboards, a small cooker and a fridge freezer that only one person could fit in at a time, a bedroom that had a double bed in and no room for anything else and the second bedroom had a single bed in a cupboard, not a room at all, and you had to get into bed via the doorway. Garden was the size of two paving slabs.

1. Modern spacious 2/3 with driveway and beautiful gardens

Ha! One little living room. Kitchen so small that to open the oven you had to step out of the room backwards. The 2/3 bedrooms was a very small double plus a very very small single with a cupboard off it. Garden was nice, but shared and opened out into the street.

1. Quaint but deceptive cottage

EA failed to mention that we were not allowed to decorate, change any furniture or so much as put a picture up on the fridge. The LL walked round with us and was an older guy but very aggressive. DH is a painter and decorator so was suggesting how the kitchen could be opened out a bit at our cost, by moving one cabinet which was very clearly rotten. EA agreed. LL growled no. Went up to bedrooms which clearly hadn't been decorated in decades and smelt. DD actually burst into tears at the "scary house." Beds were so old they were sinking. They were staying too. In the living room, there were three air rifles on the wall, bolted in. We asked would he be taking them with him. No, they were staying in "their home". The garden was nice but we were told it wasn't for us to use. We ran from that one!

One with a stream running through the garage. Estate agent tried to cheer us up with pointing out that streams often move and it might be somewhere else next year (yeah, like the living room).

One where they had taken out most of the back wall to put a massive window in and you could see the ceiling sagging.

One where the current owners clearly had no plans at all for actually moving anywhere.

The one we finally bought was ok as structure went, but when we moved in we found the cupboards full of unwashed glasses and the bin hadn't been emptied- the previous tenants had moved out 6 months ago. When we started clearing the loft, we found a suitcase full of old blood samples. We're still fond of the house though, just fewer blood samples around these days.

She was very odd, hardly had any furniture and whilst the house wasn't filthy, it clearly had not been deep cleaned in a very long time, toilet and sinks crusted with limescale, skirting boards were gross, bath enamel was worn away. She had stapled sheets up over the windows instead of curtains and let her cats use the bathroom where they pleased so the whole house smelt of cat urine. She told me her entire life story as well. Wouldn't let me look in the garden so assumed she was hiding something but when I asked the estate agent she said no, nothing wrong she just doesn't want the cats to see the garden and want to be let outside, they had never ever been outside apparently, and that's why she had the bedsheets stapled over the windows. Also made a point of describing the public transport routes to just about everywhere within a 25 mile radius despite the fact we had 2 cars. Really surreal experience.

The sitting room was full of glass tanks, some built in to alcoves but also just stacked. Some looked home made, including something that looked as if they had put glass in a built in brick television stand. There were tarantulas, land snails and reptiles of every kind, including many snakes. I'm fine with most things but have a snake phobia. I knew I would be constantly imaging a snake had escaped into the (proudly listed) cavity walls...

Upstairs was filthy and I was a bit distracted by the pole dancing pole in the master bedroom (big framed photo of the householder in burlesque costume on the wall) and had to explain to my mother that it wasn't a sign of a structural problem...

And to think I moaned about one I saw with the owner’s knickers on the bathroom floor, her bed unmade and that the breakfast washing up was still in the sink. I had been taken in to view through the back door and the EA couldn’t explain why I couldn’t use the front door.

The first place I ever viewed years ago was supposed to be empty, but as the agent was showing me the bedroom, a smelly unkempt stoned-looking man suddenly emerged from under the pile of blankets on the bed, giving me and the agent the fright of our lives. The bed man looked pretty freaked out too

More recently I viewed a gorgeous house, absolutely fell in love with it and was about to put in an offer. The agent had mentioned that there’d been several recent offers but they’d fallen through. Anyway I’m glad I didn’t because my mum called me to tell me she’d found out there’d been a horrific murder committed there several years previously - possibly why the other offers had been withdrawn? I guess some people wouldn’t mind but I would never have felt at peace there I don’t think.

We went inti one house and it smelt sooooo bad. 100% someone/thing had died in there and not been found as it literally smelt of rotting animals.
We couldn’t even find our breath and managed to walk through the ground floor into the garden. We asked the estate agents what the smell was (it was clearly a probate sale) and he said someone must have done something funny in the microwave. He then asked us if we wanted to see upstairs. There was definitely no microwave in that kitchen. More like 1950’s oven, we declined the offer to look upstairs based on how much oxygen we’d already held in walking around downstairs...

Some of these are so funny that I'm laughing out loud! The one with the person on the mattress with no bedding lying face down!

We viewed a house that was described as 'immaculately decorated and a perfect family home'. The house had evidently been subject to a flood of biblical proportions, clearly from the water tank in the loft. All the wallpaper was hanging off in every room and there were 5 dehumidifiers going full pelt downstairs.

It was a repossession property and I felt so sorry for the original owners and angry at the new vendors/mortgage company for being so dishonest. It was still up for sale 3 years after we viewed it and I hope they had to sell it at a loss. Nobody in their right mind would have paid the asking price for it with the work it needed.

Bought one in 1995 and got a huge discount because it was filthy. Wife had left 8 years previously and man had lived there since then with 3 sons who were now mid teens (twins + one). Fabulous big kitchen but carpeted and was like a pub carpet in that shoes stuck to it when waking over it. It was also black, except at the edges where there was a green pattern.
The other really grim thing were the toilets. One downstairs, with a radiator next to it - the front of the radiator was all rusty with spots radiating from the rust - clearly the result of poor aim and the upstairs loo needed the floor replacing in front as it was soggy.

There was also a shower cubicle in the master bedroom . Loved it though and could never have afforded it in good condition.

Two spring to mind. The first one, I think the couple were splitting up. We turned up on time one Sunday morning. The place was extremely untidy, upstairs the master bedroom had discarded dirty tights and knickers on the floor. In contrast the husband had a wooden workroom in the garden (think he was an architect). The garden Room was immaculate, tidy, pristine. I do remember wiping my feet when I left the house completely unintentionally. This was a house that would be on the market now for about 600k.

Second one, again couple were divorcing, she wanted rid of him but I think he was doing everything to stop the sale. The stepson was living in the house alone, his bedroom was by the front door (water tower conversion). The overriding smell which greeted you was bad BO covered over with deodorant. The worst thing was the 9mm hand gun (not replica - hubby an expert) left on top of the chest of drawers. We declined both properties.

Looking for somewhere to live when I started my PGCE (place had fallen through so I had 5 days notice and was looking once the course had started). One place looked to have a nice big bedroom, modern looking from the photo. Turns out there was a mirror right down one wall making it look bigger and it was actually tiny. House stank of weed, was untidy and there was a huge pile of washing up in the kitchen. They made a feature out of the huge TV - for someone doing a PGCE that really wasn't a big concern!

The place I ended up in had fag burns on the toilet tank, and a really damp kitchen with slugs - I only ended up there for a month as one of the other students turned out to be a really nasty piece of work to the point I felt unsafe being in the house alone with her, and I managed to find a much nicer house with a really good landlord.

I'm house hunting at the moment, no real horror stories, but one place was an older couple who were moving into sheltered accommodation, and were trying to clear out slowly whilst waiting for the house to be sold, so it was really cramped and impossible to see anything.

Discounted one really quickly because of the smell of cigarette smoke, the estate agent hadn't noticed. One was advertised as two bedrooms but one couldn't be used as such as you had to walk through it to get to the bathroom

One barely had a kitchen, it was a free standing cooker, table and fridge in a lean to, and I wasn't sure if I'd have even got a mortgage for it.

Pants discarded up the stairs. Mattresses on the floor in every room. Filthy dirty beer cans everywhere and found a man sleeping in one of the rooms.

We put in an offer that day (the only house that hadn’t been snapped up in the 1990s cash garb of houses) and lived in it for six years.

Look past the mess and dirt. You can rip out the fitments and put in your own new ones and deep clean it.

Heavily pregnant I went to view a rental town house, the ceiling was so low on the top stairs that you had to bend forward to get up them, got up with some difficulty to an admittedly beautiful room then realised I had no idea how to get back down the stairs, because I was huge, so being the strong, grown up I am I burst into tears, the poor EA ended up walking down the stairs backwards while I shuffled down on my bum.

Few years later we went to view a flat in a converted house, we couldn't get in as the police were a bit busy battering down the door to the other flat.