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...

Back in 2017 we were buying and had offered on 3 houses all at asking price and had them all turned down

2 of those houses were taken off the market and never sold.

Such a strange mindset

Not as good as a lot of the stories here. But when we bought our second house we got a phone call from the estate agents a few days before we were due to complete, the vendors hadn't realised they would have to move out once the house was sold!

Luckily we weren't selling ours (due to the downturn we couldn't afford to) so we were able to agree they could stay one extra day and move out on the Saturday.

Who sells a house and doesn't realise they'll have to move out when the sale completes

Best one was a house in the street next to ours. We were looking for a house in this area. Paid deposit the day this one went on the market (different system here, Spain).
House in the next street , not even as nice as this one, wanted over £125K more than all others in the area. When we were looking we went to see it. DH asked if there had been a mistake in the listing price, genuinely thought there had. Agent & owners said no. We asked why they thought their house was worth so much more than every other house in the area... Silence.
The agent told us after he had tried talking to the owners but they were crazy/delusional.
We bought and been in this house for a year now, those people in the next street are still trying to sell 18 months later.

When l was splitting up from my ex husband, l only looked at a couple of houses.
From the EA details l was convinced l'd go for the first one, it looked lovely on paper, a Victorian mid terraced house.
As soon as they opened the front door l was nearly knocked off my feet by the smell of cigarette smoke. lt absolutely reeked. You could see it hanging in the air like fog.
They had deep pile carpets and flock wallpaper (!). l've got asthma, l'd have had to have had the house stripped before l could even move into it. A lot of the décor was blue and white stripes, right through the house, the carpets were nasty and everywhere was yellow with nicotine.
The best bit was the kitchen. lt had white units but the side of the units either side of the oven were black. Not dirty, burnt. Literally burnt away. lt could have been a lovely house but cosmetically not for me, but that's do-able. The electrics were extremely suspect (one of the light switches in the hallway was actually hanging off the wall) and l'd have had to gut the entire place.
Went straight from there to see the second one. Which didn't look as nice from the outside, but was immaculate inside, and it was bigger, and actually a bit cheaper. l went with that one and lived there very happily for nearly 11 years.

One of my work colleagues was looking to buy his first house around the same time as l was looking, but about five miles away.
He kept us amused in the office for hours with EA details which were unbelievable.
On set of details had a photo of the kitchen which needed gutting and refitting. lt also had a sink full (and l mean full!) of dirty dishes, more on the kitchen table, accompanied by a half eaten pie and a bottle of ketchup.
He went to view one house where the woman opened the door actually breastfeeding the baby. Fair enough, but her husband was flat out asleep on the sofa when he got into the house and stayed that way for the duration of the viewing!
There was a pile of dirty washing on the floor in front of the washing machine, and a dirty nappy on the coffee table in the living room.
When they went upstairs to view the bedrooms (her still feeding the baby, my colleague was only about 22 and said he was trying to look anywhere but at her when she was talking to him) they were an absolute tip. Dirty clothes all over the floors, the bathroom was filthy (ring around the bath and unflushed toilet!), and he had to stay on the landing to view the second bedroom because there was so much stuff on the floor.
Needless to say he didn't buy either.

I remember going house hunting with my parents, in the early 70s. They wanted to move to the country, and one property we looked at was a vacant cottage, in a valley, with a stream running through it (the valley, not the house).

When we got there, with the keys from the agent, dad couldn’t open the front door at all. When he tried the back door, the key did turn, but when he pushed it, the door just fell in - dad had to prop it back up again. I have this memory of walking through room after room downstairs, that all reeked of damp.

Dad looked at the state of disrepair downstairs and told mum, dsis and I that he didn’t think it was safe for us to go upstairs. He went up, and when he stepped off the top stair onto the landing, his foot went right through the floorboards that had all the structural strength of wet cardboard!

We didn’t buy it!

I'd just got married when we were selling ours, wedding dress handing on the back of the bedroom door etc. The plave was immaculate, no easy feat with two toddlers. Showed around the viewers, every room perfect until we got to the bathroom.
There was an enormous vibrator in Purple sat onto of the cabinet from my hen do.
None of us could get out fast enough.
They didn't buy.

many years ago - nice location, reasonable sounding price. Details included a conservatory. Go to view - conservatory is a lean-to greenhouse attached by the patio doors and no kitchen, just a door through to the garage where they’ve plumbed in a kitchen and fixed a . garage still had all the usual garage type stuff in it.

There was also a chalet bungalow we looked at which had been remodelled inside; think they’d knocked down the internal supporting walls - everything was so open plan. they were a bit sheepish when I asked about the supporting walls.

We booked to view a detached house on quite an upmarket estate. On paper it looked really suitable and our experience proved that you cannot go by pictures on rightmove. You have to visit and get the feel of a property.

This house had a strange atmosphere. The rooms were quite spacious by the ceilings were very low and windows small for a new property giving it a claustrophobic feel. The kitchen for some reason had windows blocked up with breeze blocks so if you stood at the sink you looked at grey blocks rather than the garden.

The garden was very large. We walked down it until we came to what I can only describe as a mine in it. A huge deep wide hole, dangerously deep and should have been fenced, with rubbish thrown into it. It was a crater. We couldn't figure out how on earth anyone could ever landfill it.

We walked back into the house, looked at each other and the Agent asked us to go upstairs to look around. We refused. Told her we would be wasting her time as we would definitely not be buying the house. She said it was the first time anyone had ever done that to her. I said it was the first time for us too.

The house was expensive for the town, perhaps justified by position, but fgs do not present your house like a set for a horror movie.

@Lieinrequired brilliant. I suspect half of the town has been shown that house over the last decade!

I forgot that we looked at a house that had been occupied by someone housebound who had recently died.
There was a bathroom plumbed into the front room, and there was a hospital bed still in there. There was no kitchen. Just a lean to structure with a Belfast sink and a baby belling oven on a small table and a tiny fridge.

Went to see a 3 bedroom flat in SE London last year. It was enormous, split over 2 floors – lovely modern décor. A bit over our budget, and in the higher price range for that area, but thought we’d give it a whirl. It was with an online only estate agent so we emailed the time/date we’d like to see it via a contact form, and a few hours later they emailed back to confirm the viewing – and that the vendor would be doing it themselves. All good so far.
Except when we got there – we knocked and waited. No reply. Knocked again, no reply. Checked the email, yes we were there at right time. Tried to call the agent but just got put through to a hold message for their call centre. After 5 minutes or so we shrug and start to leave when a chap pops his head out the window and asks if we’re here to view the flat. We tell him we are and he lets us in. He then asks us to wait 5 minutes as he’s got a plumber in, so we stand in the hallway awkwardly until he’s done.
Finally he comes out, explains he is the vendor’s neighbour. The vendor has already moved to Wales and he’s doing the viewing as a favour to them. We finally get in the flat, and he has no idea where anything is – can’t even find the light switches. Has no idea if it has double glazing, how old the boiler is etc. The flat isn’t as nice as it was in photos, but that might be because there is STUFF everywhere. Piles of clothes on the stairs. Half packed bags for life full of toys strewn about, mattresses leaning against walls. Absolute nightmare, it looks like it’s been robbed.
Not sure how you can have the cheek to put your property up for such a high price and move hundreds of miles away yet be too cheap to pay an estate agent to actually sell it for you! Your neighbour who knows nothing about your flat isn’t exactly a glowing reflection of it. And at least try to tidy up a bit..

I went to view a cottage at Grindleford that had a tree inside. It was growing just up the front and, like a pp, it had snuck in through a gap at the side of the window.

I don't mind a new kitchen/ bathroom etc, but a bloody rainforest??? Not a chance...

We've seen a few horrors similar to described on here when renting and buying, but our worst experiences where when we decided to buy a house with a bit of land so our horse-mad daughters could have ponies of their own and we could live our country dream. Our plan was to move out of the very expensive city centre area we were in, to a cheaper rural area, keep our mortgage the same but save the cost of livery (I already had a pony on full livery at a local yard). As you can imagine, it was proving nigh on impossible to find anything we could afford and we were so desperate we looked at everything. One house was really pretty with a lovely garden and advertised as having four acres. When I asked to look around the land, I was told by the EA they would have to ask the neighbours permission first. It turned out the neighbour owned the land but the EA said he was a very nice man and he was sure he would rent it to us at a good price. I reported the EA over that. Another one advertised at £400,000 with three acres but the house needed renovating. The house was derelict, with a collapsed roof and little hoof marks all over the downstairs floor where the local sheep and goats were wandering through. It needed knocking down and re-building, which would have been very expensive as we would have needed to build a road to the site first. What I really couldn't understand was that a quick google showed that the vendors had bought the property a year before for £140,000 and the EA didn't return my call when I asked why they had put the price up so much. Wanker. Then there was the abandoned farm house with a glorious eight acres. I knew before turning up it needed a hell of a lot of work, what I didn't realise is that the stable yard backed onto a row of terraced houses and while the property had been lying empty all the neighbours had decided to put gates and doors into their walls, giving them direct access to the yard and the fields beyond. I counted 12 doors opening onto this place, so that was 12 neighbours to potentially argue with once I would have blocked their access. Not at all, claimed the EA. One of his mates lives in those houses and he knows for a fact that no one trespassed onto the property, ever. Why are the doors there, then? Couldn't answer that one. Nor could he explain why the yard of an empty farm property was covered in dog shit or the fields that led off it. The worst though, wasn't the property, but the arrogant shit of a vendor. The house as pig ugly, needed a lot of work and some of the stuff he had done was done without planning permission and very badly but the six acres of land were lovely, he had built a beautiful yard and it was right next to a bridle path, the holy grail in England. He was showing us round and by this time we were jaded and pissed off with the whole 'lets buy a horsey place it will be fun!' experience and was getting our backs up telling us how much x,y and z had cost and we had better reimburse him to make it worth his while to move out. He then showed us round the large and lovely garden and said, 'This part of the garden is actually a building plot,' (Don't know how he figured that as it had never had planning permission for anything) 'However buys this place will be under tremendous pressure to build here', (how heroic that he had been able to resist), 'I think it is only fair that if you build a house here and sell it on that I get 30 per cent of the equity and I won't sell the house unless that claus is in the contract'. I just marched straight out of there and when the EA rang to see if we would make an offer, I told him to get stuffed. I just couldn't bear to deal with that vendor. We gave up on being able to live in Somerset and re-located to the Scottish Borders instead where we could find what we wanted within our budget and our daughters are loving being country girls!

When we bought our house the bank’s valuation came back as £100k below the asking price so we couldn’t get a mortgage for more than that. This house is very unique and perfect for our forever home so we only dropped our original offer (full asking price at the time) by £50k, meaning we still paid £50k over. My husband is a very high earner and we decided that it was worth it to us, though most people prob wouldn’t do the same. All seemed fine, until a few months after moving it became clear that she had been telling most of the village that we had robbed her and took her to the cleaners financially! She knew that we weren’t playing games and that we had lost out financially to go ahead with the purchase.

Yes my current house, the 1980's paradise, dark brown woodwork everywhere.
Walked in, laughed at the price and offered £30,000 less for cash there and then.
They bit my arm off so they obviously knew it was well overpriced.

There was an enormous vibrator in Purple sat onto of the cabinet from my hen do.
None of us could get out fast enough.

Going back a few years now
We looked at a house that had been 'done up' by the owners but frankly it was a bit of a shitty job by people not very good at diy after they showed us round we were having another look by ourselves and we heard them talking to themselves - apparently it was a good thing we were both professionals because buying their house was so much more about buying a life style than just a house - it was a mid sized fairly big standard terraced house FGS!
We didn't buy their house but bought one down the road for about £1k more but done up properly. We then watched as all their diy 'improvements' fell apart over the next 6mths - It looked so bad on the outside I hate to think what it looked like inside.

The sellers showed us around (private sale), and were quite serious when they showed us the cupboard under the stairs insisting it's basically another room and could be used as a study/computer room.

We once looked at a house right on the edge of Manchester. It was about £35k more expensive than every other house on the street. The whole place stank of damp. One bedroom had two sets of drawers piled up on top of each other to try and hide the damp.

I was desperately trying to think of some polite to say to the owner - "nice view" I said as it overlooked fields to the distance. The vendor proudly replied "at night you can see the lights from the M6!".

We didn't buy

On a different house buying expedition, we had a second viewing on a lovely terraced house. The vendor kept saying "it's a lovely quiet area, never any trouble round here". We ended up not proceeding as our sale fell through.

Probably a lucky escape, because it turned out what the vendor hadn't mentioned was the house immediately neighbouring had suffered a horrifying arson attack the year before. Whilst I dont blame the vendor for not mentioning it, I do feel slightly annoyed that she was trying to pass it off as a lovely area.

Lovely proportioned Victorian 4 bed. Everything was painted a variety of sludge green, including the rickety wooden stairs. It was dank and dusty and unloved.

The kitchen and bathroom were decent but as the seller had three girls he had decided to "modernise" the property by installing two additional showers. One in the corner of the master bedroom - this was filled with bin bags and an old dirty curtain on viewing. And the other in the airing cupboard, no natural light and the ceiling was black with mould.

He had let his children artistically decorate their own rooms, one had magazine pictures glued to the walls and the other had that filled in squiggle in leftover paint from the house - so mostly sludge green and some pink.

The seller would only let one particular estate agent show anyone around the house. Everything broke as she showed us round and we nearly all got locked in the bedroom because the door handle fell off!

The garden was filled with huge weeds and a row of monster conifers that made it feel really dark despite getting good light. There were two sheds which you couldn't see as they were buried in ivy and weeds.

He was selling due to divorce and obviously wanted the asking for it. He had been on the market with a different agent and was about to fall out of contract with this agent.

We bought it with difficulty as the issues meant we could actually afford a character property in the area we wanted. On moving day something went wrong with the keys which meant we didn't get in until evening, even though we'd been out of our house from 11am. It hadn't been cleaned at all and it was grim. Our parent rallied to help us move the boxes inside and clean one room, our mums were both a bit tearful leaving us there. We also had the ex wife asking to collect some furniture and a cat that was left behind.

We've done a lot of work to it and it's great now :)

Someone I know is trying to see their house.
It's a good house, 3 bed semi with granny flat and a big garden.
The current owner runs a business from a building in the garden. It's a profitable business but not one that would be very easily transferred.
They have priced their house to include the price of the business. They're looking for about 150k more than other 3 bed semis on the road would fetch. They're also selling it privately
It's absolutely ridiculous to think they would ever get this amount for it but the won't budge. It's been on the market for about 3 years.

My neighbour got her house newly refurbished but started changing things more to her taste, which included, over the years, a lot of very (very) shoddy diy, the house was an absolute wreck and in full need of refurbishment when she put it for sale, yet she insisted that the house was going to be put at the top of the price range, to marketed by the most exclusive estate agents, which could appreciate the value and knew affluent people who would cherish her house and overgrown garden as she did. She also wanted her house to go only to a family with young kids, that could enjoy the space as much as she did.

It was in the market for almost 2 years, was sold 20% below the asking price, and the first thing the new owners did was to strip the house to the brick and start from scratch.

Didn't have any disasters when looking to buy, just the one that absolutely stank of cigarette smoke. It would have needed gutting. I did feed that back to them. It wasn't particularly overpriced for the area and property though.

There are two that DH and I have never forgotten. Both rentals. Both in Bath to give you an idea of the types of buildings these were in.

One was a ground floor flat. The current tenant obviously had people living there that shouldn't have been. The living room floor was covered in mattresses, it was pitch black in there, I think they had wall coverings over the window. The kitchen was tiny. One person at a time tiny and there was no oven as there literally wasn't the space for one. The EA suggested that we would be fine with a microwave.

Another flat was in a converted house. First floor. We walked in and were immediately in a narrow hallway. To the left was the kitchen. Newly done, not a bad size. Turned out it was the entire left hand side of the flat. To the right was the living room. A door in the living room led to the bedroom. The wall between the bedroom and living room didn't reach the ceiling. Far from it. I'm 5'0 and if I'd stood on the sofa, I'd have been able to see over the wall. In the bedroom there was a clothes rail in front of what looked like a front door. We asked what that was, turns out it was an external door leading to the hallway outside. The living room/bedroom arrangement took up the entire right side of the flat. So then my DH asked where the bathroom was. The owner looked so pleased with himself and took us back to the hallway in the middle. He opened a small concertina door and revealed a shower built into the kitchen wall. Just a shower. Okay, where was the toilet? He produced a Yale key. We had a private toilet in the building. It was downstairs off the main entrance hall near the external front door. But it was okay as only we had the key for it, no-one else would use it.

We did not rent it. He wanted £600pcm for it too, which was similar to other 1 bedroom flats in the area that had a full bathroom and a toilet within the property as well as full sized walls (this was around 2005).