To expect people to do a bit of research before viewing a house?

[iswhois]

Had three people turn up so far and have turned the house down due to a "showstopper" which they could have easily for seen had they done some research on the location or looking at the floor plans.

I know they are entitled to not buy the house for whatever reason they wish but it just feels like a massive waste of everyone's time.

Maybe I'm just bitter and desperate to move haha

@NewPapaGuinea yes I'd consider the from price. If it's £10k more they want then they shouldn't have bothered reducing - maybe they're deluded as to its real value?
Mine has been on a few days and I told someone today that the minimum I'll take is the offers over price. I was offered £1k more than an unextended complete renovation project on the next street (same style/layout of house).

@catfeets The house is immaculate, but in terms of size and location and other houses sold nearby the oieo price is about right. £10k more puts it in line with bigger houses that need a lick of paint.

Fair enough if they want more, but feel like they wasted our time entertaining offers, knowing they’d reject. Just put oieo price at the minimum.

It is many, many years since we bought our home so floorplans were not a thing for us. In fact, the way it worked then was that every few days a wodge of house details would arrive in the post. EAs would also call if a house was a new listing and would highlight the positives and vastly underplay the negatives. We viewed our current home on the strength of one of those calls. We had stated off street parking as a requirement -this house had none, but it did have a front garden and that proved big enough to give some over to a parking space. There were otge issues but we loved the house and bought it anyway. Had we received the details in the mail, we wouldn't have bothered.

Apologies if it's already been said, but I've come round to the Australian system where a house is open on a number of days, the owner leaves and the EA manages all the sticky-beak time wasters like me.

It's entirely expected that the entire neighbourhood traipses through your house for no other reason than to be nosey. The etiquette is to politely declare your lack of interest and not take away the expensive flyers, etc.

Yes that wld annoy me, YANBU. Some people think nothing of wasting their own time looking at houses they won't or can't buy 🙄

Our first viewer told us he loved the house. He wld bring his wife back to look at it if it's still for sale when they've sold theirs. I enquires more to find out that he didn't even have it on the market 🙈 he said I think you'll have sold it before I've sold mine, duh 😂

Another guy about 40ish came with his parents, they asked all sorts of odd questions but seemed to like it. Feedback from estate agent was he really liked it but its outside his budget, his mum saw the house online, loved it and got a bit carried away!

Thankfully the next viewers bought it lol.

Whereas I understand it is annoying having to tidy up the house for viewers that then don't offer, Y really AB very U.

looked at a lot of places, none of them ticked all my boxes because I know that I can't afford everything on my wishlist.

This ^ . Especailly when you are buying for the first time, or making a big jump (perhaps from a 1 bed flat to a family home). A House is a VAST amount of money to buy. You are signing a contract for a loan that will take 25 years or more to pay back. You'd have to be an incredibly foolish confident person to just do that without comparing the house with several others you'd looked round to be sure this was 'the one'.

Viewing lots helped me work out what I wanted and what I could and couldn't compromise on.

This ^. Have you never watched Location, Location, Location ? It happens so much. They take them to a bigger house in the suburbs and a tiny flat in the centre, so they can really think about what it is they want / would miss. Many people need to actually walk through that to be able to 'feel' how far the station is or how close the pub is. Measurements aren't the same.

Next to a pub - depends on the pub depends on the pub if its ok or not - you need to see it to know.
Yup

Bathroom through the bedroom, in some houses you can rearrange rooms eg swap the living room with the bedroom. Again you need to see it, to know it.

and also we've all seen floorplans that are inaccurate / miss a door / put it in the wrong place

Or see it and decided if its amazing and you can live with other annoyances.

This ^ . Buying your home isn't like any other business transaction. You have to "feel it". Our home, that we've been very happy in for getting on for 20 years wasn't on our radar. The EA persuaded us to come and have a look on the same day that we were looking at 2 other properties with them. DH and I both knew it was 'the one'

Which answers the points people have made about EAs trying to get people to view. That is their actual job. When we bought ours, we didn't consider this one for a couple of reasons, not least it was out of our price range - but, having got us here, we just fell for it.

My ds is just thinking about buying now. My advice to him is to go and start looking round some properties now. Look at several and then a) you get to see what people have done to their houses so you can copy those ideas and b) you know what the houses are like / the area is like / that advantage and disadvantages of certain property types are like, so when you see one you can afford, you are ready to snap it up, and not be umming and ahhing about if it is 'the one'.

Oops, sorry, very long post

@Venicelover

Sorry, but you are being ridiculous. Online viewing is very different to seeing it in person. Often buyers view a lot of properties and to do research on every one of them prior to viewing is an unreasonable expectation.

reading the useful information provided on the EA's website is not arduous "research", it only takes minutes and saves a lot of wasted viewings. IOW ,people who view a lot of properties are those with most to gain from those few minutes in the comfort of their own home.

It can be very frustrating, trying to sell your home. Some people clearly don’t read the details and then complain to the EA. Like the couple who complained our property was not open plan. Nowhere on the details of photos was there anything to remotely suggest the house was open plan. They can’t have read the details or looked at the floor plan. Same was true for the woman who said she didn’t like all the stairs....

Of course I don’t expect everyone who views my home will want to buy it, that’s clearly not going to happen, and I don’t believe anyone thinks that. But there are some viewers who do need to apply a big dollop of comment sense.

And as for the woman who booked a viewing and then cancelled at the last minute without any reason or apology, not once but twice within one week ... don’t get me started!

Yes, I would still view even if it didn't have all my preferences. Eg we want a garage, but will still see houses without, just incase the house is an absolute dream and the compromise is no garage.

Estate agents are sneaky fuckers and don't always put square footage on floor plans (and when you call and ask they say "oh big enough") and use silly wide lenses to make houses look bigger, so I can understand why size would matter when you see it in person.

We had a viewer who brought her three children It was a very wet day and they ran around indoors as if in a playpark. She loved the house, so much she came back for a second viewing next day, bringing along her woman friend and WF's 2 kids. Wonderful place.; then she kept asking if we'd be including this or that in the sale . Everything to be left behind was already mentioned in the brochure; but she was after other stuff, paintings, and an IKEA rug. So when she made a third appt, with husband, I was getting slightly jaded. Though not as fed up as him. He walks in the door and says "Sorry, Mrs, this is a complete waste of your time and mine; we are not moving house, she does this all the time, goodbye" and marches back out. She left redfaced.

@TinyMetalBirds

Someone should tell Bake Off if a Showstopper is a bad thing

Well that’s what I was thinking. Does no one watch bake off. But then I wondered if I’d got it wrong because I’ve not watched it since it went to channel 4.

@NewPapaGuinea I'd assume the estate agent has pushed them to reduce it to get more interest but there's really no point in them doing so if they aren't prepared to actually take the new price. They're wasting people's time in the hopes that a couple of people will love it so much that they're willing to go over or have a price war.
Could it be that the new price puts them into a different price bracket on rightmove to hit a wider audience?

It is hard - we rejected our current house and refused to view it despite the agent's persistence because I didn't like it online - I wanted a fourth bedroom upstairs and an en suite and a large open plan kitchen / dining / living room.
Eventually we looked at all the other houses that met our brief and for various reasons rejected them (weirdly shaped gardens that resulted in house overlooking neighbour gardens, houses packed in too close together, too much work to do that was not at all clear in the brief or particulars etc) we agreed to view this house and fell in love with it as soon as we walked in. Despite not having many of the things on our list (and being on a road we specifically said was too busy for us to live on and had a pub a block away) if we had followed it on paper we would never have viewed it, just continued to flat out reject it.
Funnily the house we thought we would love had a much smaller garden than the pics implied and rear access parking that just wasn't clear at all from the ad. I was most surprised that we weren't buying it as I expected to love it which goes to show how misleading the ads can be

Our house is shared ownership, very clearly pointed out on the particulars. You can only buy a shared ownership property if you're eligible to go on the council waiting list. This was discussed at length with the estate agent. They repeatedly sent cash buyers round, expecting to buy a 3 bed semi in a pretty village for £42,000, the price of the 25% share we were selling, or people who already had property which excludes them from buying this house. In the end, we changed estate agents and every time they phoned to book a viewing, I made sure the potential purchaser was actually eligible to proceed.

We nearly rejected a house based on a panel on next door being kicked in. It’s a rented property, but tbf, the neighbours are sometimes loud but mostly lovely.

Selling, I was super frustrated when multiple viewers complained about the lack of garage. This was very clear on the details. If you want a garage, then view somewhere with one!

@IsaLain

Showstopper doesnt mean what you think it does.

A showstopper is something awesome; so good it beats everything else.

You're looking for deal breaker.

I think someone in your office started using show stopped because they forgot the word deal breaker and the rest if you have just gone with it.

Not necessarily - it's quite common to use showstopper regarding something that stops an activity from continuing.

Look at the dictionary definition

@Timekeeper2

It never would have ever, ever ever occurred to me to look at floor plans (besides the point that I am a visual person and am as hopeless at 'reading' floor plans as I am at reading graphs, maps etc). Unless it is a massive, massive house or mansion, I didn't think floor plans was even a 'thing' that you had access to. Last time I was looking at homes, floor plans weren't even a thing mentioned until during the contracts were drawn up. Why would you think any normal layperson would even think about floor plans, let alone even look at them, 0R could even understand/grasp them as a reference?

But that's just you? If I'm looking on Rightmove I'll go 1) map 2) floor plan 3) photos because decor is by far the easiest thing to correct

@LovesHisMummyReally

Having bought in a dry market recently, i can see that sometimes you hope to fall in love with a place such that you are willing to compromise on some things, so you view even though you know it won't tick all of your boxes. But i can also admit that that is naïve and unfair to sellers.

Why on earth would that be unfair to sellers? That’s exactly what the seller wants.

Oh I've had this with both houses we've sold. The first one whilst beautiful was very clearly a two bedroomed terraced house so not big. I was told it was too small. With this one I've been told that the kitchen is too small but again the floor plan and photos show it isn't large neither is it a kitchen/diner. I've been told that they want a new build (this is 1930s); a bigger house for the same money in the same location (don't we all); and a bigger garden. Viewers are rude!

Viewers are rude

I think this kinda sums it up, nothing the poster has written is rude, it’s simply they don’t love the house enough to over come th issues stated. The issues are the issues, so it’s not rude to point them out.

But some folks can’t take any criticism of their property, to say anything negative and not wish to buy it is considered rude by many.

I had a friend selling whose garden was tiny due to a large extension and it was over looked, folks kept giving the reason they didn’t wish to buy as it was a tiny garden and over looked, she could not understand how they didn’t know this from the pics.

The truth was the pics didn’t show just how small the garden was nor did they show just how overlooked it was from all sides, and the reality was the person who eventually bought it also thought these things, but overcame it as she loved the house. As did my friend when she bought it.

It was not rude to point it out, nor was it stupid of people to view it, in the hope they loved it enough.

We bought a house on a busy road many years ago, something which was a mistake and I should have listened to my instincts, but we loved the house, it was more than we could afford in a better location, so we overlooked it and bought. Others who viewed it and didn’t fall in love with it would have said, no sorry it’s on a busy road, something that they would have known prior to viewing.

I dont think its about "rudeness"at all.

I couldn't give a flying fck if someone told me it was the ugliest house they've ever seen. I inherited it, I didnt choose it, it makes zero difference to me if someone else finds it a horrible house. I do not care. All I want is to sell it and get the money.

With that end in mind, it irritates me that people are wasting time. That is my sole annoyance in the middle of a pandemic. I just want to get on and sell the damn thing - I dont care if others find it hideous or whatever. Just dont waste everyone's time is all! If you know you dont want a house in a rural location, then dont bloody look at one- its really very simple (which is what I'm presuming the viewers are tbh!).

Part of househunting is working out what you thought you didn't want, but are actually prepared to compromise on. 'I really wanted to live a few streets over, but if this one gets me my third bedroom' etc. And you only really work this out once you've seen a few and got a feel for what moving two streets over gets you. But other times you can't overcome the location (or whatever) for the house so it's legit to say 'We wanted something nearer the Tube'. Also Estate Agents don't always take note of your deal breakers. I've seen too many tiny kitchens when I said the kitchen mattered. It's all a big balancing act though, because no house ticks all the boxes.

Exactly Strawberry.
Our current house, which we bought 17 yrs ago when our dc were small, has been brilliant for us in so many ways despite not ticking boxes I thought were important. I 100% would buy it again if you could transfer me back in time. You need to get into houses and picture yourself in there to really decide if what you thought was crucial really is, when you actually see other things the house has to offer.