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.

Went to see a house as a child with my DM and DF.

The first thing that greeted you going into the kitchen were all the rosettes on the wall won by the owners’ dogs. The rest of the house was given over to the dogs - they had free reign and it reeked if dogs piss - the bare floorboards stained with piss.

Vile!

Has anyone ever come across floortex? It's like a furry vinyl floor covering...well we bought our house with this crap glued to the kitchen and bathroom floors...smelt of ammonia (especially around the loo)....not nice when you're on your hands and knees with a multi tool scraping it from the floor boards. Makes me gag just thinking abut it.

I was the one to blame when my parents were selling our house. I'd taken the keys, hidden them somewhere and couldn't remember where, however much they coaxed me to do so.

Potential buyers had to come in to the house through the window

I was 5yo at the time, if that makes it any less terrible; no idea if they bought it at all - really couldn't care at that age

A floating shit in the loo < not envy

Tenanted house. Tenants were away on holiday and has left a huge pan of stew on the side in the kitchen uncovered. Stinking and full of flies. There was a fridge in the lounge.

Carpet covered in stains and damp in places and public hairs all over the bathrooms

Barbie pink artex in the Hall

We bought it.

The tenants defrosted their fridge onto the carpet when they left. Their toddlers had clearly been recently potty trained...or not given the state of the carpet! The tenant came back to get his post as we were stripping everything else and just walked in. We changed the locks quite quickly!

This time we're buying new build....though I've heard stories about them too 😱

Oh Buddy that is so sad. So very horribly upsetting for you and how awful for her and her poor family that she didn’t feel she had any other option.

I’ve never had anything as awful as that but I’ve found more than a few abandoned dogs and it always breaks my heart. Dogs flying at you when you thought the house was empty is frightening but those poor creatures have just been locked in an empty house and abandoned. It’s unbelievably difficult as well to get someone to attend within a few hours - which I totally understand but I can’t take a random unknown dog home and I also can’t sit with a dog for the next 3 days until someone can get to it. I always used to get food and water for the poor creatures but I had to shut one in after waiting for 6 hours because I had to collect my son. I think I rang every animal charity in a 40 mile radius and there was just nobody available. I actually made my husband go there in the evening because I couldn’t bear the thought of this dog thinking it had been abandoned again. He said the poor thing was just frantic and it just sat shaking and crying in a corner for an hour before it trusted him enough to come for a cuddle Thankfully a lovely volunteer from one of the local rescues came on her way home from work at 10pm and picked the dog up to go to hers to be fostered until it could be rehomed.

Buddy your post made me think about all the dreadfully sad things you encounter when you’re helping people move. So many horribly upsetting reasons, and so many vulnerable people who I was glad I managed to help before they fell through the net. I’ve often thought about the ones who might have encountered an agent who was less scrupulous, or even just less kind, as I’ve also given a lot of time to people who strictly weren’t “my problem” but who I couldn’t bear not to help.

for you and for that poor lady and her family. Sorry you had to go through that

I think I’ve been lucky! Creepiest viewing was a house in a suburban housing estate back in the 90’s, owner showed us round. If you can picture a stereotype “dirty mac” bloke that’s the look - a cross between Timmy Mallett and Benny Hill. House was dimly lit, a picture of a woman astride a creamy pole had pride of place above the mantelpiece. Pile of playboy or similar magazines in the corner. He suggested showing the upstairs, we mumbled something about the kitchen being too small so no thank you and scarpered.

Mr DIY house was another - every surface seemed to be wood or cork. He was very proud of the four poster bed (imagine just standard 4x4 planks screwed together) and the standard lamp (another bit of 4x4 nailed to a bit of board with a lampshade on top).

Marmablade Another des res here but this time better connected they put a pylon in the front garden! In fact its a bungalow to fit under the wires. The line was there and the estate was built around the line

This was where a 132,000 volt cable came of the pylons some years ago and fell across a number of houses! Buggered if i'd want to live there all that wiring and radiation etc:(

goo.gl/maps/AVU3tk7b2fETnwwM6

I am afraid I don't find much of this that shocking. It's pretty standard for rental viewings /London.

Two different homes:

Giant dead stinky long legged bugs in bathtub.

Giant dirty women's underwear inside out on back of kitchen chair.

I wanted to build an unused house after the last one.

Went to see a house where the couple had fallen out and were separating. They had a chalk line dividing the house into two zones, hers and hers. It stank of cats and dogs as the DMZ, though a common area, was still plainly in dispute when it came to cleaning. A crack you could put your hand into ran the entire length, top to bottom, of a load bearing interior wall.

So far, have only viewed nice houses, I am now prepared for anything after reading these.

Working as an estate agent. One property up for sale had a huge tree in the garden with a preservation order on it. The roots had caused subsidence to the house and the cracks inside and outside the house were inches wide. The poor seller had no chance of selling as the house was basically falling apart, they had spent years and thousands of pounds trying to get the tree cut down and the house fixed and yet they still kept it on the market. One house had turned their garden into a giant koi carp pond - it would have cost any buyer a fortune to turn back in to a garden unless they were just as interested in fish. A beautiful thatched cottage was right next to a railway line - there was a path width between the railway line and the cottage. The price of the property was high and the noise from the trains was loud. The whole time I was there it never sold

We had a viewing of a house where the couple had split up, (not at all amicably) but husband was still living in the house. He didn't want to sell the house and give half to his wife, so he was doing his best to put off potential buyers. The kitchen was disgusting and the bathroom carpet (ugh!) was so dirty you couldn't tell what colour it was. When the estate agent showed us round he was sitting in an armchair eating his tea and watching tv. He didn't bat an eyelid when we walked in, just carried on as if we weren't there.

I have only ever had one bad viewing.
It was my own home, rental, which we were forced to give notice on. To help our landlady out we agreed to viewings whilst we were packing up.
It was already a really really miserable time (we had both been made redundant, had a 6 month old and were preparing to move in with my in-laws) so I felt awful as it was.
The first couple who came made horrible comments about the things that were left out in the house (mugs/kettle for clean up crew) and commented that we were obviously very poor because the boxes we were packing our things into weren’t “removal” boxes.
The second couple looked into the babies nursery (still perfect as I couldn’t bear to move anything) and said “ugh! What a nasty, tacky display. I don’t think we want this house” - before running their fingers over every single surface, screwing up the baby's bedsheets and opening the wardrobe.
The house was being let as empty. ALL of the stuff was ours and they rudely commented about “I wouldn’t let my baby sleep in that” (a lovely white crib from Ikea) and even pulled drawers out of his wardrobe, tipped his money box upside down and leafed through his books, leaving huge greasy fingerprints. She also laughed at the cute Winnie the Pooh cross stitch his great gran had made for him. Cow.
They did the same thing in our bedroom - ripping open drawers of underwear and commenting “thank heaven I’m not that fat”, laughing at my shoes (which are IC so I get it but still) and commenting on my choice of bedspread (plain white)
They were just super tacky and nasty.
After that we asked for any other viewings to be completed once we had moved out.

Wow I've been lucky the worst I've seen was a dayglo yellow bathroom suite, it was fairly new too.

This isn’t too bad at all compared to others, but we once went to view a flat where the current tenant clearly wasn’t told we were coming. We opened the living room door to discover him conked out on the sofa with a kebab box on his chest

ToffeePennie that is awful!

Think my favourite "bad viewing" was the 4 bed house where half the ground floor had been annexed by the LL and made into a convenience store. The door to the shop hadn't even been boarded up.

Place was filthy too.

Actually, there was one house in the countryside which was like something off the Waltons. Unfinished barely covers it.

Looked fairly nice from the outside and photos.
Walked into hallway and massive ball of fluff faced us, ok let's move on. Living room had neon green latex walls and was messy and dirty. Kitchen had bright red cupboard door, badly painted and filthy pots everywhere. The garden had waist high weeds in it. Didn't want to go upstairs but did, the owners bedroom smelled like a teenage boys and her son was in the shower so we couldn't see the bathroom, I'm glad though to be honest. We couldn't wait to get out of there and wash ourselves.

Artex walls, not latex.

We viewed a house a few years ago, four bedroom and a great price for the area, the owner showed us around, scruffy looking guy, as he opened the door he was doing up his fly.
He showed us the garage first, we thought it odd there was a double bed and a shower and urinal in there, then that every room including the living room had a massive bed in it, there was a slide that went through the wall from one room to another and a room that was entirely full of outfits, leather, feather boas, sequin dresses etc, the windows had a reflective coating on so you could see out but not in from outside.
Slightly strange we thought?
It was only on talking to a friend later that she said it was clearly a brothel
Us completely oblivious 🤣

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

Yes and no, @TheCherries. My concern, on seeing a really dirty house would be that, if they can’t be bothered to keep it even basically clean, are they likely to have bothered to do any maintenance or dealt with any problems with the structure or the gas/electricity/plumbing.

So you could get a real bargain, for the price of some deep cleaning and redecorating, or you could buy somewhere that is a bottomless pit of expensive issues. I’m not sure I would want to take the risk.

What @SDTG said- the place was in bad repair under the filth & I think getting into it would have just revealed more issues and would be a bit of a money pit.