Viewing houses- surely everyone does this?

[Sophieagain1984]

We're house hunting. Whenever I view a house, I always knock on the door of the next door neighbour, pretending I've got the wrong house- I like to know what the neighbour is like and sometimes they even give you useful info.

DH says no one else does this and it's weird. WDYT?

How can you do that, when you have an estate agent with you? Me,there's a pub at the end of our road, I wanted to make sure it didn't cause problems. I knocked on neighbours doors,and they referred me to another near neighbour who has lived here since the property was built in 1965.

I've had it done to me. We had someone looking at buying the flat downstairs who knocked on our door to ask if they could see what the flat looked like with the walls removed.

We told them that all the walls were structural and they wouldn't be allowed to remove any by the landlord, and that we hadn't. Never saw them again thankfully.

I think it's tempting but weird. You won't be the only people looking at that house - imagine if all prospective buyers knocked on the neighbours door 'by mistake'!

No that’s mental.

Intrusive and batshit.

And LOL - having seen the EA photos of the front of the house, most houses actually have numbers etc - you must come across like a right idiot.

I do clock the state of neighbours houses, drive past at different times of day, ask the vendors who lives next door. But if I had a stream of people viewing the house next door do this they would get very short shrift indeed.

Stop it!

I've viewed A LOT of houses in my time and I've never once done this. I'd be pretty pissed off if next door were selling and viewers kept knocking on our door to judge us (that's basically what you are doing).

Well I have told DH that everyone agrees with him and he is very smug.

(I am still going to keep doing it though- don't really care if they think I'm odd, I'm more interested in whether I think they're odd!)

Well many MNers seem never to answer the door so you might not get very far.

I hop you never move next door to me, with your attitude that it is OK to disturb people and vet them.

I wouldn’t do it myself. But if my neighbour was selling and they had a viewer knock on my door who just wanted to ask for an honest opinion on the area and street, I’d happily give it. I think if you’re living in a semi-detached or terraced, you want to know what the neighbours are like.. if they were rude or a bit of a dick, it would 100% put me off buying the house and it would be better to know sooner than later.

@Sophieagain1984 how can you tell what sort you f neighbours they'll be from a 5 minute conversation?

We did that once and the neighbours invited us in for a cup of tea and then tried to sell us their house instead.

You can tell if they're obviously problem neighbours. Of course they may be secret problem neighbours but not much you can do about that.

I hop you never move next door to me, with your attitude that it is OK to disturb people and vet them.

Seems unlikely so rest easy!

No, never done it - would hate to make someone come to the door for no reason. Also, the big for sale sign outside is usually a bit of a giveaway! You might end up buying the house and think that your neighbours are great but they'll be thinking that their new neighbour is a bit of a dope! 😂

Never heard of anyone doing it. Not sure it’d be particularly useful either. Even serial killers can pass for good neighbours when they want to.

I've never done that pretending to have the wrong house. I HAVE knocked on neighbours door to say we're interested in purchasing the house next door and ask them about the neighbourhood. Most people are lovely and sometimes invite us in for a cuppa!

Interesting how many people mention signs. Where I live (in London) signs have pretty much disappeared- whenever you see one it's actually a sponsored advertisement for a school fete. No houses that are for sale have a sign up. Must be a regional thing.

Never done that myself, but sounds like a good idea.
My husband always said to look at the neighbours' gardens and/or windows to see if the gardens were well kept, if there were proper curtains/blinds up (i.e. not a bedsheet or something) as it gave an indication as to what they were like.

One house we looked at, the current tenants were still there and showed us around. We were able to ask them about the neighbours. Luckily, they were honest and said the neighbours were the reason they were moving as they were causing a lot of hassle for them (noise, intimidation, pets scaring their kids etc).

I think I would consider doing this now having had one set of utterly awful abusive neighbours who have thankfully moved now. It made my life a misery for so long so I'd want to try somehow and see what they might be like 🤷🏻‍♀️

Yeah, that's weird.

Have never done that. I have driven down streets on a Friday/Saturday night to see what the vibe is. That's the best time of the week to see if there's any anti-social shenanigans going on.

When we have been house hunting we've had walks around the neighbourhood and made conversations with people in the area (say they're doing their garden or washing their car), ask them what the area's like but never knocked on their door.

I do think neighbours are important. I actually paid 5k to my elderly neighbours in exchange for vetting who they were going to sell it to, and then another 5k so they would drop the price so they people I wanted could buy it.
10k, even back then, was a good investment for good neighbours. We lived next door to them for 20years, I only told them when I left what I'd done. (We now don't have neighbours)

What could you possibly assess in a few seconds chat? Certainly their race, maybe how they speak.
Doesn’t sound a pleasant way of judging people to me.

Hmm this happened to me last week I think. Knock at 8am saying they were here to view the house. I'm on maternity leave and was in mismatched PJs and both of the kids were screaming. I was pretty brusque.

We are very nice really (much nicer than the people selling!) but if they were checking us out we'd definitely have put them off!

I'd find this very intrusive if I was the neighbour. Unless you're serious about buying the house there's no need and it's a bit weird. If you genuinely were interested in buying then I don't see the harm in knocking to introduce yourself but don't lie about it.