Tell me your stories about totally deluded house vendors

[Ludicrousoverpricing]

So, been looking at houses for maybe 6ish months now and I just cant get over how completely and utterly deluded some people are about what they think their houses are worth??

So share with me your stories about deluded house vendors or otherwise horror stories regarding moving house? Need something to entertain myself with during this lockdown...

My own experience recently

House 1: nice house and location but horrible on the inside. Needed completely gutting and renovating as hadn't had so much as a lick of paint in 20+ years. Vendor seemed to think that it only needed 'minor modernisation' eg re tiling a bathroom or changing kitchen cupboard doors was required and that said minor modernisation would mean the property would be worth several £10,000s more after the work was done. In reality even with a total new kitchen, bathrooms, flooring etc it wouldn't be worth anywhere near that. It probably would only JUST be worth their actual asking price AFTER it has had extensive work done on it.
You can buy a new build house of the same size in a similar area for the same price they are asking for their old dilapidated house. Why the hell would I pay the same for your house that needs extensive renovating when I can get the same house newly built without all the hassle of having to organise renovating it myself!

House 2: Same as house 1, nice area and house, very dated and old bathrooms/carpet etc. House next door sold recently, was a bigger house and impeccable throughout and they seem to believe their house is worth the same if not more... for a smaller house that needs at very minimum the bathrooms and flooring redoing!

House 3: Ditto of house 2 basically. Exact same situation. Believes their tired and in desperate need of some TLC house is worth the same as the bigger house that sold next door that was immaculate inside.

House 4: Just blatantly on the market for £70k more than the semi detached house is worth. Dont even know what the vendor is trying at because they will never get an offer close to what they're marketing it at. You can buy a nice 5 bedroom detached house or 4 bedroom newbuild for the price they are marketing theirs at.

Not sure if it's a coincidence or not that all these vendors are older individuals downsizing...

I looked at a cottage a month back. Described as having immaculate decor. From the road outside even I could see it needed a new roof. Inside it was fitted carpets in each room with a filthy brown margin round the walls. The floors creaked and the banisters on the stairs wobbled. One of the stairs basically sagged in the middle. I assumed every bit of wood in the place was rotten. The rooms were tiny, the sitting room about 3m square. Wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole. They wanted more for it than the owners of an immaculate 3-bed Edwardian terrace in the same area were asking.

Kitchen was shoved into an alcove. Literally. Could possibly have been ok as a holiday let but imagine one half of a knocked through room, the second half had a plaster alcove. The kitchen was in that. I honestly don't understand how they thought it was acceptable to even say the house HAD a kitchen.

We once viewed a cottage which was described as “needing some decoration”.

The front door was a piece of corrugated iron. There was no electricity or gas. There was one small window at the back of the only room. The walls were papered with copies of The Sun newspaper. The was a ladder going upstairs but I didn’t risk that. Looking up you could see straight through the roof.

The owners had it the market for £100k. This was in 1998. We didn’t buy it!

I viewed a house that stank of cat piss. The vendor actually picked up a cat mid piss and carried it downstairs, trailing a stream of piss behind him. The bedrooms had scary doll collections including a set of Golden Girls figures. The walls and doors and kitchen cupboards were gouged by cat claws. He had paid £190k and thought it was still worth that even though it was now pissy and scratched to bits. A new balcony had been added to the back of the house and the vendor thought it added another £20k to the value, even though it was a fucking hideous construction made of sleepers and it needed pulling down. .

Another vendor tried to convince me that the large back garden was a prime building plot that could be sold. I pointed out that his house filled the full width of his plot so there was no access to the garden? He gestured to the neighbour’s drive and said “there’s plenty of room there”. Yep he thought that he could build a house in his back garden and have access over his neighbours drive!

Good thread

Funniest, or creepiest at the time, was a bog standard flat being sold by a middle aged couple (I was twenty, they seemed ancient).
Got to the master bedroom (ghastly phrase), and as we went in, each grabbed my hand and started telling me how exciting the mirror tiles on the ceiling "made things" - especially with addition of the full wall of mirror-door wardrobes.
Couldn't get out of there fast enough.

BTW - all the posters writing about cigarette & tobacco smells - leave out bowls of white vinegar, works brilliantly. I discovered that & used it when I sold my Father's home (before arranging any viewings)

Oh, so many! One 2 bed terrace, couldn’t get parked so I nipped in while my dh circled. Owners told me they were honourably sticking with someone who’d offered 6 months ago but hadn’t proceeded. I left.

Another tenanted property, weird shared courtyard out back, neighbours literally sitting under the back room window waving. 😮 Estate agent raved that it would be ‘sociable’. The toilet was black inside. 🤮

Another tenanted house, walls dripping with nicotine, stinking of fags, wall in the garden about to fall over.

My mother claimed for years that her house was worth about £100K more than it was, wrong side of the village/a certain street. She has finally decided it’s worth less based on what much better houses in the street have sold for. Bonkers.

I forgot to mention the flat we went to view. The bathroom had shagpile 😱 and there were several rats in cages in there with lots of bedding/poo fallen out. The bloke was asleep in the lounge and his wife showed us round the garden which had a train line at the end (way before google maps!). ‘Oh’ she says ‘You get used to the 4am freight 🚂. You don’t hear it after a while’. 😯 Funnily enough, we didn’t put in an offer. 🤔

Far too many hilarious experiences like the above to list here.

Has anyone had the vendor attempting to justify their stupidly high price?

We had a guy who went through a long list of what he ‘needed’: he intended to buy a really nice house in ‘x’ village, near to his daughter, (away from town facilities) and would obviously need a brand new car. His wife would also need a new car. He wanted to get all of the equity out of the property as that was ‘his pension’.

Loads of other points such as “I spent £nn 000’s on the extension, and £nn 000’s on the decorating and garden landscaping. Blah, blah, blah…

The house was way overpriced compared with similar properties nearby. A completely insane way to value a property. Only afterwards did the agent tell us that he’d refused lots of offers.

Quite a few agents were happy to waste our time with that sort of nonsense.

The funniest experience we had was when viewing a rather lovely house with no obvious problems. On entering the master bedroom, neatly lined up on a bedside table were three umm… marital aids. Various colours, in a straight line, in size order.

What you must remember when buying a house is this.. you are buying bricks and mortar and the value of the land it sits on, and fixtures and fittings. You are not buying internal decoration. That is why mortgage companies only lend a percentage of value. They lend on the rebuilding cost. So anything you pay over the rebuilding cost is just for cosmetic decoration a d prime fixtures. It's therefore better to buy a house needing decoration and fixtures upgrading than one that has just been redecorated and done, as you'll probably change it anyway.

I've literally stood in a house that reeked so badly of damp that it actually made me feel sick, only to be told by the EA that "no there isn't any damp at all I can't smell a thing"

I also went to a house viewing with a friend, a brand new housing development and looked in the show home. It was a 4-bed detached - round here there are ten a penny of them for around £250k. This one was £400k and the site was sandwiched between a motorway and an industrial estate. The noise from traffic was horrendous even through double glazing. The (very pushy) sales lady even tried to get me to consider buying one - and I said sorry but no it's way overpriced and in a terrible location. She did a MN head tilt and said in a sickly voice "Really Hun? You are honestly the first person to say that.". Liar

pissy and scratched to bits

just so funny...imagining this on their online listing!

You could be talking about my MIL OP. She lives in a good area which is desirable but her house hasn't been modernised since the 70s. It's weirdly laid out too.

However she thinks "it's worth a million" because a number of much larger, much nicer houses on her street have gone for that.

The houses that went for those prices were two storey, modern and beautiful. Hers is a bungalow built in the 70s...that's not unusual in Oz at all and indeed, some bungalows DO go for a million....but not averagely built un-improved ones!

She's resolute and when all this is over she wants to auction it so she can see what people are willing to pay.

I mean...why not NOT auction it and see what people are willing to pay? She'll have to pay more for an auction!

Oh and the house we had to tiptoe around because there were sleeping children in all the bedrooms. I get it, kids need naps, but all 3 rooms were full of kids, felt a bit weird just standing there looking around - and then one, who must have been 3, woke up and completely lost her shit. I mean why wouldn't she, poor thing was expecting her dad and a big hulking pregnant lady she never met before was wandering around her room. And the vendor was actually annoyed with me!

EveryDay

I think if they saw you lingering in there, they'd propose a threesome next!

@GlummyMcGlummerson
I’ve had the same but with asbestos! Obviously it doesn’t smell but it was a very common building material prior to 1980 in Australia and it’s easily identifiable. One agent tried to tell me the building surveyor didn’t know what he was talking about and tried to convince me it would be safe to move in and start drilling into walls 🙄

That’s all well and good ved but you have missed the point of the thread, the houses the OP is talking about that need renovation are on at the same price as houses that are already renovated! Absolutely fine to buy a house that needs doing up so long as it is reflected in the price, which they rarely are, hence this thread called “totally deluded house vendors”

When I first bought a flat as a student I looked at loads in my cheap price range. One guy kept his bed in his kitchen and hadn’t bothered to get electricity card so we had to view it in the dark with streetlights only. It was freezing and this was September!

Another flat in the same area was a bit nicer but the couple had a newborn and zero space for moving around. We had to climb over piles of stuff to see the kitchen and bedroom while the dad changed a poonami of a nappy on their kitchen board without a mat down.

Another ground floor flat we viewed, the elderly owner explained he only wanted to sell one of the bedrooms and a half share of the living room and kitchen and stay in the house with us to be looked after. Tried to explain to the estate agent what he’d said and was told not to be so silly that we’d misunderstood him. We heard from one of his neighbours when time came to move he refused to leave the flat and the police were called. Felt awful for the poor guy whose family apparently sold the place from under him to put him in a home.

Looked at a new build last fall, beautiful kitchen and main floor. We went to the basement and it was full of puddles, not just in one spot, but all over. We didn't even bother to look at the bedrooms.

Ahh this brings back memories!

The one where we offered asking but the vendor rejected the offer as he thought it was worth more. Lunatic.

The one which had a lovely garden but a huge patch of damp in the master bedroom and a dehumidifier going. The estate agent tried to convince us it was just cosmetic

The one where the vendor told us he had bought it for his daughter but she had moved to London he clearly was an entrepreneur of some sort and had bought it, sat on it empty for a while and now thought it was worth a fortune. Yes it was in excellent catchment and had huge garden but house itself was small and needed everything doing. Plus the 3rd bedroom had an enormous cupboard over the stairs which meant there was no room for a bed!

We actually ended up buying the "3 double bedroom" house which has 2 bedrooms.. the "master bedroom" is actually downstairs and I'd call it a dining room..!

The first rented property me and my OH ever viewed. They were asking for quite low rent but the pictures online looked okay. Anyway we arrived to find that the tree in the front garden had grown significantly bigger than it was on the pictures which told us the pictures we had seen must have been very old...

Long story short the bathroom was absolutely black with mould, there was bottles of mould spray everywhere which clearly hadn't worked. There was a smashed window, the stair carpet was supposed to be cream but was actually grey with filth and stains. The tiles on the kitchen floor were smashed to bits in about 4 different places, the back garden had lumps of concrete all over the place, literally maybe 100 football sized boulders of concrete. The whole place stunk of damp and smoke, the ceilings were covered in paint that looked like it had been purposely flicked there. The final straw was looking in a downstairs cupboard to discover a dinner plate sized hole in the back of it that led directly to the back garden. We were horrified and the guy showing us around clearly noticed that. He said ''dont worry, it just needs a new stair carpet so would be ready to move into in a week or two''

We said thanks but no thanks, left the property and a neighbour came out and asked us if the house was still a **hole and that we were probably the 7th or 8th couple he had seen that day making a quick getaway

Oh, this reminded me of a house I viewed when we were looking to buy. I'd totally forgotten about it, or maybe I blocked it out

I arrived at the house, to be shown around by a girl of around 15. The house smelt of cigarette smoke and of pets. The house itself was smoky, I'd use the word foggy. It was so cluttered, that you could barely walk through it. They had what I would describe as a menagerie of animals plonked anywhere and everywhere, it was lucky I like animals, if I'd had any sort of phobia I'd have been screwed! There were snakes, lizards, big dogs, cats, hamsters, rats, birds, you name it, they probably had it or a variant of it. The kids were all not dressed, sat in their pants, in one bedroom someone was actually asleep. The house was small, like a 2 bed terrace with a 3rd bedroom only fit to be a walk in wardrobe, but there was at least 8 people living there plus all these animals. The final straw was the teenage girl showing me around announcing that they have a lovely large garden but unfortunately she couldn't show me as ot was dark and although they had a light out there, there would be "loads of dog shit" I've never been so glad to leave anywhere in my life, it's really no wonder the house had been on the market 2 years strangely enough that was the only house out of 11 that I viewed, that the estate agent didn't bother to ask me what was wrong with it...

Priced at the top end but the photos looked good so we went to see it.
You could see where they'd just wiped away mould on the hallway walls, the kitchen cabinets were hanging off the wall, some rooms were missing plasterboard, three windows were blown and they'd placed toys in front of wall cracks.
I was so annoyed that when the estate agent asked me for my thoughts, I gave them. The price had dropped 45k in a week, I obviously wasn't the only one unimpressed.

One house we viewed had a kitchen that all men couldnt stand up in (i mean it, it was strange the ceiling pretty much hit my head) no backgArden and when we viewed it there was 20 others there same time. They they created open house to make it seem like lots wanted it. Everyone was in the door of the kitchen saying this wouldnt work. A builder who viewed it was muttering only way was to dig out the concrete floor and thats expensive. House was on market still year later

Stinking of cat piss, stale smoke or both if you’re lucky. The area I’m buying in has good schools so the vendors / agents think they can hike the price, no matter what state the house is in.

Lockdown has frozen the market, I get why owner occupiers won’t sell but I suspect there could be some reduced asking prices on probate / ex rentals, in a couple of months.

we had a 3 bedroom house in an expensive area but being only two and young, we were looking to live centrally and wanted a first floor flat In a period property with massively high ceilings and big windows, something that we could refurbish into something magazine like.

So the agent called to say this first floor flat in a very nice area had just come into the market, headed there the next day, after ringing a bell for a few minutes, we notice a small sign at the basement courtyard so that’s it. A basement flat, the tiniest we have seen in our life. The kitchen was about the size of an ensuite, the second bedroom was used as a dining room and the living room was practically a little hallway with enough space for 1 armchair next to an electrical fire. The posh woman living in it has decorated everything in expensive William Morris wall paper that made the ceilings look even lower than they were. It was like a little arts and craft dungeon and the woman was behaving as if she was selling an amazing property that we couldn’t dream to afford.

It took quite a lot of effort to stop my husband telling her that despite the expensive wall paper her little dungeon was in the market at least 70% over priced.

The other one was a 3 bedroom Victorian house, it had a massive collection of drug pipes covering the whole of the alcoves in the living room. The cornices have been painted in gold and red, with the gold resembling big gold fangs, the dining room ceiling had been lowered down a metre to accommodate a pockey ensuite upstairs, the wall were stained from water running from above, the kitchen needed redoing, the “conservatory” was handmade with wood and plastic sheets stapled on. The door to the attic bedroom was made with a pink Formica table, a round one, split in two. It stank beyond belief. The owner was very proud of all the work they had done with their “own hands” and were asking the same as if the property was in top condition and had been recently refurbished. We came out within 5 minutes as we couldn’t breath and head straight home for a shower.