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...

Absolutely loving these, would love to see some links, too.

We were looking at relocating my then DP, to my horribly expensive market town. He was selling his lovely 3 bed Victorian detached house with large garden and original features,

Looked at a couple of really nicely done 2 bed houses as befitting a town with money. Was then shown round a very dated 2 bed semi that hadn’t been touched since the 50’s aside from the addition of a very rickety extension. However it didn’t appear to have a bathroom. The estate agent looked embarrassed and showed us a door UNDER THE STAIRS. An entire bathroom with mini bath was crammed in.

They wanted the same price as a house that had an actual room for washing and going to the loo in.

OP sometimes an older run down house can be worth much more than a new build. Depending on when it was built and the new build developer.
Some (not all) new builds are pretty much made of cardboard and on flood planes. They have tiny gardens and devalue instantly because you're also paying for new carpets/kitchen etc that are not worth as much once used.
They look very nice but I know a lot of people that regretted buying a new build and now would never buy one. Leasehold issues, private road issues and service charges, cracks, unfinished, windows not fitting properly, no utilities for months.
The leasehold scam is enough to put me off even buying a house under 20 years old.

The worst one I saw, was a house that from the outside looked ok, but inside OMG.
It stank, and I mean stank. It was like a wall of smell that hit you in the face when you walked in. The kitchen walls and ceiling were completely yellow from grease. It was a 3 bed place but a family of 16 were living in it (which most were there when we were viewing) so there were mattresses completely covering the floors in the bedrooms and most of the living room so there was a little 'pathway' you could walk and that was it. The bathroom was the most disgusting thing I've ever seen, the toilet lid was left up for some reason and the toilet was completely black. Every window was blown, mould around the windows and doors, the carpet was sticky. So much more too and it was absolutely vile. I still shudder at the thought of it.
It was an open house with appointments and the EA was stuck there all day and I felt sorry for her. The cost of this house was 50k more expensive than next door that had sold a few months before which was in pristine condition with a landscaped garden!

I remember being asked to removed shoes once - the carpet was immaculate though as the vendor had just installed a white carpet throughout the house. Who has a white carpet in a family house?? It was also very ‘minimal’ with no clutter anywhere, not even in the kids rather empty bedrooms but she refused to show us any cupboards or even the garage...

Another was a potential holiday cottage, no inside photos but claimed to have been recently renovated, double glazing throughout, fitted kitchen with space for washing machine etc. When we got there it looked like he had barely started renovating - there was no kitchen, only beginning of stud walls going in, some window spaces still boarded up.

Went to view one where the family had knocked the fittings out of the airing cupboard, wedged in a cot and listed it as a 4 bed.

Probably the closest real life thing to Harry Potter I’ve seen tbh.

Several. The ones that stand out include:

The end of terrace when we were looking to trade up with toddler and another on the way. Nice house, reasonable, but end of terrace next to railway line. Garden separated by not very substantial fence. At least 8 trains an hour each way and you couldn't talk when a train went past. Estate agent tried to tell me that the price made it a good buy!

Houses 2 & 3 - before and after. Both rank because of pets, stank, mats of pet hair and unliveable. Second one I'd have bought as it was very reasonably priced but DH not keen. Recently went on the market for nearly double after relatively modest refurbishment! Did ask estate agent if social services had been notified as small child living in that squalor.

The agent seemed gobsmacked when I commented that it needed some work

This. It's not so much the vendors as it is the EAs in my experience.

We would like to move. But we live in the cheapest part of our area and the rest of it is insanely expensive. Spotted a good sized house on at, frankly, more than we could afford but much more affordable than most. So went to take a look.

On plus side, I do think it was priced more or less fairly. It was cheaper than other houses in the area because a) the garden was smaller than average for the area b) while the rooms were decent sized, the overall footprint was smaller than average and c) the house needs some modernisation. On the upper end - there's no actual heating system so this would need to be installed. The kitchen was tidy and clean but old, with cupboard doors hanging off and chipped counters etc. All the bedrooms needed replastering and painting, built in cupboards needed new doors and I suspected the house would probably need complete rewiring.

When I mentioned to the estate agent that while I thought it was well priced, it was still just too much for us considering how much we'd have to do to the house, she was completely surprised. According to her, the only thing that needed doing was the heating and we could do that for no more than £6,000. hahaha.

I mean, to be fair, the rest of livable and could have been done over time, but it was her absolute certainty that no, none of it would need doing. Ever.

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

Sounds like they were trying to get you interested in more than just the house!

Eeyoresstickhouse you should have called the police

.

Oh, and YY to the schools thing. Drives me mad. Either they blatantly lie or are completely deluded. I don't get it. In our area, the catchment zones are small for many schools. In addition, there are two schools with one of those weird catchments done on some complicated algorithm so that if you live on one road, even though it's 2 miles from the school, you might get in but if you live on another road, 50 yards away, you might not (I'm exaggerating slightly) but estate agents all love to say things like, "yes, there are many great schools and this property is well placed for all of them."

To be fair, in my experience, a lot of people are silly about school places too. Because the tenant before SIL got her DC into a specific school she told SIL that she was guaranteed a place as they got one. Except... as it turned out, the house is at the edge of the distance catchment and the previous tenant's child scraped in. SIL's DC did NOT get in. She was outraged that she had to send DC to a different school.

Oh another one. The house with no parking. 4 bedroom house, lovely big garden. Had been 'updated' in, probably, the 1960s so most of the lovely Victorian features had been ripped out. Needed a lot of work too. But literally the nearest parking was a 5 minute walk away and I had 3 children 12 to 5! Estate agent tried to persuade me it was perfectly doable! To be fair to him, I saw him later at another viewing and he admitted it would have been a bad choice for us but he was selling the house so that's what he did!

Worked as an estate agent for a couple of years

Still remember the day a vendor shouted in my face because I didn't include a close of picture of her kitchen taps

I do remember looking round a house years ago where the floor to part of the hall had collapsed, no heating, electricity only in one room, bath you pulled out the plug and the water ran down a little gutter across the floor and out a hole in the wall. No kitchen. Windows broken. Only one person allowed to look in the attic at one time ‘just in case’. To be fair it was sold as a complete renovation project and I am sure the price reflected this. But what shocked me most was an elderly woman had lived there until only a few months earlier in just one room (it was a 4/5 room house)

Schools reminded me of another one. Owners refused to negotiate on price because we weren't on the market. Estate agent did agree with us that our house would sell easily (this was back in the late 90s) but they were intransigent. Put house on market Friday, sold by Monday. Still refused to negotiate. Found out house didn't fall into any school's catchment area and pulled out. Really felt for wife - husband was working away leaving her to deal with the house sale which they needed so they could join him and he just made it very difficult.

Our vendors wanted us to pay extra for a pretty worn fitted carpet in the sitting room. We said no thanks and they went to the trouble of removing it. Wonder if they ever used it?

Back in the 90s we were looking to buy our first home and went to view a traditional Victorian 2up 2down in a street of brick terraces. No internet at the time and no printed pictures. The agent was keen for us to see it as it had ‘potential’.

We stepped through the front door and the whole house had been ‘modernised’ to open-plan back in the sixties with no interior walls downstairs. A batchelor pad with shag pile filthy carpet and peeling brick effect wallpaper in a little terraced house! We kept banging our head on a low slung glass bowl ceiling pendant almost at shoulder height. 😂 The worst was the staircase had been removed and wooden planks stretched up the wall with NO bannister or anything to support them. Being brave we ventured upstairs to marvel at the stained orange corner bath. The place was an illegal death-trap.

The old guy told us he’d lived there since the sixties and was a pro golfer who was mostly away and just crashed there occasionally. I think he still thought the place swinging and modern and was oblivious to living in a grimy, badly maintained, time-warp.

Saw a house once, end plot on a street. Must have had massive gardens. Well the original house was a 70’s build and then in the 90’s the vendors had built a massive extension - easily half the size of the existing house. So downstairs massive lounge, massive kitchen. The original kitchen was still there but was now the utility room (would have been a small kitchen but made a very large utility room). All fairly positive so far - then went upstairs so in the extension were 2 very large bedrooms. First problem both rooms had patio doors which exited onto a balcony with steps to the front and back garden. The other bedrooms were tiny, still with the 70’s carpets and washstands in the bedrooms. It was overpriced which the EA admitted and said the vendor had had offers which she was declining.

We have been looking for a house, wait for it 18 months...: we have very particular requirements.
We live Kent/ London borders.... some houses have been on the market for ages and the price has not dropped at all, any house that goes up for sale that is priced right will be sold in a week.
I have seen houses 4 bed semi that are on the market for 900k and they need work and I mean work new bathrooms, kitchen, flooring, roof, electric and plumbing and then a couple of doors down they are all finished and on the market for 875k. I had one owner say we have had offers but they were really low and our house is worth more than what it is on for..... no it would have sold if it was worth this much but you can’t see why your house has been on the market for a year. 😂

As it is now, was then, and ever will be;

A house is only worth what someone will PAY for it!.

Amen to that!.

This thread just reinforces my dislike for estate agents.

Years ago we were thinking of buying a Village Post Office, viewed lots all over the country. One sticks in my mind - it was a PO which sold sandwiches, cakes and general groceries. Shop/PO was lovely and we were really impressed. Then we went through to the private accommodation upstairs. Owner asked us to watch on the stairs as cat had been sick - we picked our way upstairs to see a three bed roomed apartment which was absolutely filthy. Even now the thought of it makes me feel ill - bathroom was awful and there was cat poo in the corner of the kitchen.

It took me years before I could buy a sandwich.

Friend of mine bought a house for 380k 4/5 years ago on a huge new build estate.

Identical brand new houses are still selling for 380k, however friend worked out how much she has spent on hers (furniture, paint, wallpaper, mortgage) and put it on the market for 460k.

She is absolutely adament her 5yr old house is worth more than the brand new one. Ive given up explaining!

We viewed a house and the estate agent showed us round. As soon as the door opened you could smell dog and piss.
The kitchen was disgusting and out the back there was 2 large dog bowls. I asked about the dog as dd was allergic and was told the dog was elderly and only stayed in the living room. All I could think was how it might be incontinent, hence the smell.
There was no bannister heading up the staircase, so one slip and you were falling into the living room.
No door on bathroom. Estate agent said it would be a great family home. We didn’t buy. It went for under asking price after about 6 months. By then we had bought in the next street a clean house needing no work for less.

About a year later I got talking to a mum at the school, she had bought it and once moved in had to strip all plaster off back to bricks and pull the floorboards up as everything was damp with dog pee and couldn’t get the smell to go. She found after a few months that the bathroom had a leak so had to get a new bathroom and replace floor and then living room ceiling. She had to spend thousands on it.