Is it weird to knock on neighbours doors next to the house you may want to buy?

[newyorkparis]

Just this really? It’s a big purchase and I’d like to get a feel for how they are and whether there are any tensions or issues to be aware of.

Would it be strange if we did this?

I knocked on the neighbours houses for the last house we were going to buy. I suspected the vendors were telling us lots of lies. My instincts were correct. All the neighbours advised us against buying the house, said the property floods, the road washes away, and the owners were assholes. So glad I visited them all!

I will be doing it this time too for one of the neighbours, but only because they have shared access to the back of their house over our land, so I want to make sure they don’t mind having closed gates as we have dogs.

I’d run. Don’t buy it. The rubbish etc is a bad sign.

Both of those sound a bit iffy @newyorkparis.

When we were buying the house before our current one in 2018, we tried knocking on the neighbour's door because there was only 'our' house, the neighbour's and one other which was a mansion used as a wedding venue. We wanted to know if the weddings were an issue. We were buying a repossession so no contact with the vendors.

Unfortunately the next door property had huge locked gates and no-one responded to our knocks. We couldn't easily come back as we'd driven 200 miles to view the house.

On completion day we went next door to introduce ourselves to the neighbours. This time the gates were open and the husband (an older man) invited us in, then proceeded to let rip about how awful it was living next to a noisy wedding venue. He made it obvious that if we didn't support him in trying to get it shut down, we weren't welcome in the 'village' (which was really just a scattering of detached properties including farms spread over a wide rural area).

When we left his house I was adamant we'd have to immediately sell the property at auction because he'd made living there sound absolutely terrible.

Fortunately he'd exaggerated. They were only licensed for four weddings (no funerals lol!) per year and in the first two years only held five in total. Then covid struck, the mansion owners moved in, the weddings stopped and never resumed 😉

I didn't see the mad neighbour to speak to again in six and a half years and never met his wife who kept a very low profile. Apart from him getting out his chainsaw etc when there was a wedding, they were actually perfect neighbours!

Perhaps they said that because they didn’t like the look of YOU!

I'm not sure if someone buying mine did that, or if they just met them, but the estate agent fed back to me that one couple didn't put in an offer because the neighbour told them there was nowhere to park and the pub (about two streets away) was very noisy!
No idea why they did that as we got on reasonably well (and they also owned their house) - but we gave them a wide berth after that.
(and did eventually sell)

I don’t think so. It would be weird if they all did that, and one of them even invited me in for a cup of tea.

Also, they didn’t manage to sell it in the end. Four sales fell through and they ended up renting it out. It was a stables conversion and they’d cowboyed it all.