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.

Was shown round a VERY expensive house two years ago but when we looked inside with the EA the kitchen consisted of one wooden chair and an old wooden stove. On leaving I got seriously bitten by fleas, it was then that the EA told us that the previous owner had kept dogs, cats and hens inside the house.

I wasn’t in this house but there are some really expensive houses near us. There is one that must be in the tens of millions - you can very clearly see into the dirty kitchen and it has plastic curtains and patio furniture in there. Very odd!

These make the house we viewed to rent that smelled like piss and fish mixed and warmed up look like a palace!

When we met the previous owner of our current home, he confessed that one of his son's friends committed suicide in the spare bedroom. None of us will sleep back there.

Many years ago went to see a bedsit in a large Victorian house in a leafy affluent part of the city so I was expecting something okish.

The “business-man” owner roared up in a really expensive sports car. There were some ladies wearing tacky negligee night-wear milling about downstairs, which seemed odd at that time of the day.
He told me he must have chat “to his girls” while he was here.

The bedsit turned out to be vile - smelly and furnished with tatty furniture and shabby nylon, but it was “sleaze” factor and his exploitative wanker vibes that really put me off. Something dodgy going on there for sure!!

@Ghostontoast brothel. Couldn't be more obvious😂

Yes that’s what I thought - but but why rent out a room as a bedsit?

Perhaps he was hoping you'd join the girls-maybe in exchange for cheap rent?

@Ghostontoast hiring strategy😁

@Ghostomtoast, definitely dodgy! There's a guy near me who rents rooms out in an admittedly lovely house and makes a feature of his sex pond hot tub that is for communal use. The snag is that he "prefers" female housemates and wants a full body picture of you before he'll take any requests to meet & view further .

Much better viewing today though .

This subject always fascinates me, the way some people live.

Ex-h and I bought a lovely little house in a quiet street in a nice part of North Herts. After a year, a much bigger property came up for sale at the top of the road and was very reasonably priced. The people who lived in it were well turned out, little boy and a baby, drove nice cars etc. Anyway, we booked to view as it was such a good opportunity with loads of room for an extension and a huge garden with a minimal step up in mortgage payments. Well. I've never seen the like when we walked in. The downstairs toilet was utterly filthy, lid up on badly shit stained toilet, filthy sink. There was crap everywhere. You literally couldn't see the size of the rooms without looking at the ceilings because of the amount of bags, boxes, baskets full of rubbish everywhere. From the sofa area, the TV was also obscured by boxes. This wasn't stuff they were packing, it was all covered in dust and had clearly been there for a long time. The kitchen wasn't much better and really grubby but what shocked me was the bathroom. The bath was full to the brim with used nappies in nappy sacks. It stank. They couldn't have bathed or showered themselves or their children in days. I couldn't believe they'd put this house up for sale without at least attempting to clear up. The woman kept saying "oh sorry for the clutter" and "sorry about the nappies" but surely if you know you've got people viewing you'd clear up (a bit?). Anyway, we put an offer in as we felt it would be lovely when ripped out and done up. They accepted. The bastards then pulled out a few days before exchange as they'd had a "better offer". So, we still had to see them for a while but we knew what filthy shysters they were....and they knew we knew

We viewed a rental property which was slightly odd - over several floors, yet somehow all basement. The weirdest thing though was that the filthy bathroom lead to the back door, as a sort of “galley bathroom”. This back door was open although the current tenants were out and when the EA went to close it we realised it was wide open because it would not shut! Not sure what insurance companies would make of that arrangement...

The one we ended up renting developed mushrooms on the ceiling of the “walk in wardrobe” while we lived there as the upstairs flat had a leak that the LL wouldn’t acknowledge.

Plenty of awful ones, but the one that stands out was the one where we came back riddled with fleas. We were hopping. Had to strip down to the skin, immediately wash all our clothes, get in the shower. Ugh.

Ooo, yes. When I was a teenager we went to view a house being sold by a divorcée who was at pains to slag off her ex husband for forcing her to sell, so was not in the least bit interested in showing us round.

Her lover was also in the house at the time and it was very clear to us all that all she wanted to do was take him upstairs and shag his brains out.

We didn't stay long.

Sockets hanging out the walls, exposed wires, front door smashed from being broken into previously but not fixed or replaced.
Filthy

*Only bathroom in house accessed through main bedroom

I’ve lived in two houses like that. One for 10 year. It’s not uncommon here. It was fine for us as a couple.*

Same in our area. Character properties seem to all be like this around here.

We went to see what should have been an amazing Art Deco house - we knew it needed work but I wasn't daunted I'm an architect.
We noticed the damp the moment we walked in and were told that the water tank on the roof had burst and they'd had a major water damage. Not so much of a biggy until we got to the basement which was waist deep in water, we stood on the steps and looked down at it...turns out it was well tanked and when the water tank burst it had all collected there, 4 years ago and they had been living in the house with the stagnant 'swimming pool' all that time.
We would still have been interested if he had budged on the price but he wanted £650k for it (nice area but we are in the NE and it needed mega work) - he knocked it down in the end and built flats. So sad.

There was the one where the vendor had precariously stacked up bed side tables, one on top of another in a desperate attempt to hide damp.

The vendor also proudly announced the lights of the m6 could be seen at night from the window at the top of the stairs.

We also viewed another where every room had 5 cats. The whole house reeked of piss.

So many....

There was the house that gave me an allergy - came out in hives when I got home. There was the house with some kind of "presence" in the main bedroom - not just me, the estate wouldn't go in that room. There was the house with a dead pigeon on the kitchen worktop. There was the house where there had been a murder.

But worst of all was the house where the carpet had been taken up in the sitting room and there was a weird stain on the floorboards. 'Ah, yes,' said the agent, 'they didn't find the body for quite a while.'

You may not be surprised to learn that we didn't make an offer on that one. Some of the others, yes...

On another viewing we witnessed a neighbour assault their teenage son. It was a hot summers day and windows were open. All of a sudden we can hear the child being severely verbally abused for having left his light on, then all of a sudden his head was banged with force against the window.

We were horrified and called the police, Moments after making the call the estate agent breezily gets out of his car with "lovely quiet area, isn't it?"

A house we viewed had a bath with around 200 toilet roll tubes in it. You could almost picture someone sitting on the loo, coming to the end of a roll of toilet paper and deftly aiming it into the bath tub.

Toilet in the garden (as in lying sideways on the grass). Breakfast bar built so that you couldn’t get past it. Had to squeeze. Slipped on some scum on the floor and fell and hurt leg. Still have a scar 15 years on.

If I am buying a house, I don't care how dirty it is if I can get a decent price on it.
Surely you negotiate the price down due to work that needs doing, and then get a skip and a deep clean company on moving day.

I can never understand why people say - Oh its a mess, don;t buy it. The messy stuff just gets thrown away.

Look past it to the big rooms etc.

Artex, hardly any mentions so far. One of worst houses we saw when last looking to buy had textured artex plaster on every wall and ceiling. As well as being filthy with dust and filth in all the textured bits. Plus dog shit on floors and garden was covered in it. We did consider offering but decided the having to hack every plastered surface off was too much work...

Another we viewed was a vacant property that thieves had broken into and stolen all the copper heating pipes but not switched the water off. It was sad to see so much wanton damage.

Always buy houses with potential and one we currently live in the previous owner had done lots of electrics over the years including his own beautifully homemade wooden connection boxes. It's a miracle the house hadn't burnt down.

PS by artex I don't mean gentle swirls etc but rustic style uneven textured plaster. Think dodgy Italian restaurant decor of the 80s/90s.