Obvious estate agent lies

[Splattsagain]

I'm inspired to start this thread by the house I found on RightMove with a garden described as (and I quote) "a very private garden to enjoy al fresco dining during those balmy summer months". This is then accompanied by a photo of said garden, quite clearly showing the block of flats right next door overlooking it.

@housethatbuiltme that's had me laughing my socks off - that's so bad it's untrue

I reckon you’d be pretty successful and efficient. Avoid wasting days and weeks cycling through dozens of people needing 3 bedrooms who quickly discover there’s only 2 and a cupboard under the stairs, and spend your time showing around people who actually just want a 2-bed!

I really just don’t understand why they like to misrepresent the property in the listing, it’s not like no one will ever find out. You won’t sell a house with a thin strip of grass in front (and a communal green across the road) to a family looking for a garden no matter how well you explain the artistic interpretation of what a garden is.

There was an estate agent in South London called Roy Brooks who insisted on truthful descriptions. The agency still exists but sadly does what all the others do now.

Way, way back there was a London estate agent called Roy Brooks who was famous for being brutally (and amusingly) honest about the properties he was selling. He seemed to do pretty well - certainly stayed in business - but the idea doesn't seem to have caught on... After his death, his agency was bought by Dexters, so I presume truth in advertising is now totally out of the window.

www.mortgagestrategy.co.uk/opinion/roy-brooks/

Cross posted with you!

Yes! Dexters bought the agency out a long time after he died though. They operated as an independent agency until very recently but the brutal honesty had gone.

I liked that EA who was in the news a few months ago - the one who had a really good voice and she sang her descriptions to the tunes of well-known pop songs!

@GinnyBee I know- having moved 21 times( rentals) and owned 3 - I'm pretty good at understanding what matters to people and not wasting their time - we've rented some fab places over the years but seen some real crap ones too -and that's even at the pretty high end- I just don't see the point of wasting either seller or buyers time or landlords/tenants -

I was just selling and my EA described my house as 'tranquil' and 'private'.
It's on 80s housing estate (overlooked) and backing onto fairly busy road (with bus route). Made him change it.

Were I live there is a posh desirable area eg poshton. any house just outside that area gets described as 'poshton border' , except now this border has got bigger and bigger and seems to include the edges of the dodgy sink estate about a mile away.

renting houses can be a minefield too!
one place I don't think we would ever find again! out in the sticks small cottage and I mean small then onto the kitchen was a sort of conservatory lean to, which had take up all the garden area. as it was bare I trying to be friendly though it was dark and gloomy said oh yes nice place to sit out. woman shook her head freezing in winter boiling in summer as its got no opening windows. the glass was also frosted like a bathroom nobody behind so no idea. would rather have had the garden. the front door opened straight onto the busy narrow road and the front garden was over the road. to finish it off lady told us she lived next door so would pop in few times a day to say hello. it was also advertised as unfurnished but there was very various old dark furniture which she told me the full history of each piece!
the worst we saw was this very strange place where they had tried to convert a building but it did not work out. narrow sort of walkway garden to approach so you had to walk sideways crab like to get in. up a step to a dated galley kitchen up 3 steps and an odd empty room no windows no idea what for then up 6 steps to the bedroom which had a wall missing at top of the steps so you had a curtain across reasonable bedroom but in the middle of the room was a loo! no cover nothing only loo in the place. I mean love my partner and all that but do not want to wake up to him perched on the loo. be really awkward explaining to visitors too . back down stairs across this odd space and up 3 steps to a poky lounge that was dark looked onto a brick wall horrible dark dank place yukky house

@sixtyandfabulousofcourse yep there are some very bizzare rentals out there- we once looked at a pretty nice 4 bed semi impish part of south west London and straight off lounge it had a door and a toilet behind it - I'm all for a downstairs loo- but not off your lounge!

I looked at a house a few days ago which had a back extension marked on the floor plan as a family room and sitting room. In reality the extension was a wooden framed lean to, no insulation, plastic roof, and mould. Plus the wide camera shot of the garden was completely misleading. TBF she did say she'd have the floor plan labelling amended...

There's a house for sale in my area, for a while the "lead" photo on Rightmove was a cgi image of something completely different. I saw the road name and didn't remember a house like that. I think it has planning permission to extend/remodel and this is what it could look like if you spent a fortune doing the work, but it was smaller, plainer and uglier in real life. I thought it was quite misleading.

I know exactly where you mean and it would be difficult to find a busier road, bar standing in the middle of the M25 !

Our road of Victorian terraces is often described in EA details as ‘tree lined’ - there are two spindly saplings, both at the beginning of the long road. Not quite the leafy avenue suggested.

I've just thought of a bizarre rental from my youth. I was trying to rent a 1 bedroom flat. Saw one advertised that was cheap. I thought there would be something dodgy about it as it was such a good price but that it would be silly to not have a look.
It wasn't a flat at all. It was a huge four story house and the lady who owned it lived on the bottom floor. On the next three floors she had turned rooms into kitchens, bedrooms bathrooms and living rooms so each floor did indeed have one bedroom, and it's own facilities but they weren't "flats" in any sense of the word, you had to walk through someone else's "flat" to get to your own and noone had their own front door to their "flat"
She was absolutely insistent that these were indeed "flats" when I explained that I was looking for a flat, not a few rooms for my use and couldn't understand how I didn't have the privacy I wanted. She acted like I was being pernickity and waiting her time.
Like, if you lived on the first floor, you would have people from the second and third floors walking through your "flat" to get to their own any time of the day and night but she didn't see this as an issue.

Reminds me of a rental flat that DH and I went to see in Ealing many years back. In fact, it was someone's loft. The kitchen was under a very sloping roof so you'd have to bend in half and really reach to chop things on top of the counters and the bedroom was accessed by crawling - yes, crawling - through a hole in some plasterboard from the living room. Needless to say we didn't take it.

"Garden Room or Garden Office" - oh what a multitude of sins those cover!!!! I've been house hunting recently and in my neck of the woods, post-Covid so many houses are now selling with a "garden room / office". It is clearly very open to interpretation exactly what this constitutes. I went to one place and saw a shed that had been described as a "garden office" so I asked the estate agent how it could possibly be described as an office and he breezily told me that it had WiFi! I wasn't able to suppress my guffaw.

Hilarious!

Jesus. I had the same thing when I rented a house in Bolton. Although it was through a letting agent, the LL lived around the corner and repeatedly (day or night) would knock on without giving the 24 hours notice. After enduring this for years, I complained to the EA and was served a S21 - on Xmas Eve.

I sued for harassment actually and illegal eviction as over the years I'd had salacious remarks made to me and he'd entered the house when I was out etc. I hated the old pervert.

I've just seen a listing for a new build on a new estate near us. It's called "Meadow View" - which is both somewhat ironic and very misleading since the meadow view that anyone in the surrounding area used to have is gone because said houses are being built on the meadow!

What! I used to live in an area described by local EAs as being in the “golden triangle” 😭

Ah @Twiglets1 - the Fine City?? That's where I am now! I don't ever refer to it like that unless I'm taking the piss!!

I had to google that but yes, Norwich.