Location, Location ,Location

[JediJim]

Been watching Phil and Kirstie on LLL over the years and have to wonder what the point of it is. Yes ,it’s easy watching and you get to see some property porn, but surely if the house hunters themselves don’t know what they want, how can Phil and Kirstie find it?
Typical episode -Tom and Helen want a three or maybe four bed in the suburbs. They have two year old Hettie and now have baby number two on the way. It needs to be near a good school and a short distance from the train station. Tom is an IT manger, while Helen works from home.They have a healthy budget of £550 k but could go higher if the right house comes along.
After looking at about 50 properties, they’ve enlisted our help. Followed by a few silly jokes between Phil and Kirstie.

The point is, Phil and Kirstie ( and the shows researchers) surely can only find the same properties as anyone else could. I mean Zoopla and Right Move can find properties at the touch of a few clicks after putting in your preferred area and needs. Otherwise maybe local estate agents maybe?!
The fact that the house hunters in some cases have already seen the properties or dismissed it after seeing it online proves this. They sometimes admit they already seen it.
Why can’t they show more working class people on more modest ( realistic) budgets? For example Dave who works as a truck driver and his partner Sue who works as a super market worker. They have a maximum budget of £230k. Might be good to see house hunters looking for homes that the average family could afford.

Having said all this I do enjoy the show and like Phil and Kirstie. Just wish it wasn’t always middle class yuppie types who have amazing budgets for 32 year old first time buyers !!

People who claim to want a project almost invariably get much less enthusiastic about it when confronted with a house where they'd have to do even relatively minor works.

Place in the Sun always makes me wonder how things like surveys work in other countries. I was watching one the other day where the couple buying were so keen that they stretched their budget to the limit, and were still keen when told there was someone else in the running and the property would go to whichever one could complete the sale first. Surely you'd want to check whether you were about to blow your savings on a property that was about to fall down?

I've never felt the same about LLL since they did an episode in Liverpool and someone wanted to buy in Gateacre. In the V/O, Kirsty and Phil loftily informed everyone about the lovely amenities in this desirable area while mispronuncing its name every single time they said it.

Clearly nobody, from researchers upwards, had spent long enough there to find out this rather basic fact, and the presenters had just been parachuted in to do their bits to camera then whisked away again, so hadn't found out either.

It rather undermines the show's premise that these are two hotshot property experts with their fingers on the throbbing pulse of the market if they can't even get the name of a place right

Their researchers do leaflets drops and door knocking so they do sometimes view properties not on the open market, they householder has to leave for the day and they use to receive a fee, not sure if they still do.

@MeolsCop the Gateacre episode 🙈! Unbelievable. Surely one of the researchers talking to an estate agent about the area would have picked it up?

It’s cheap TV to make (you don’t need sets, expensive actors, special effects, scripts etc) and brings in advertising revenue because it is popular. The current series is even cheaper.

That said it is quite entertaining.

RedStreet exactly - you could imagine the whole of Liverpool cringing at that episode, and a lot of the North-West too! I'm not even from nearby - I've never knowingly been there - and even I know how it's pronounced. Very sloppy production indeed.

Definitely cringing at the Gate acre episode!

In fact I posted about it on FB at the time so it pops up in my memories just to make me cringe some more.

Escape to the Country became my lockdown guilty pleasure (guilty because I waste so much time on it) but I do wonder whether some of the couples aren't just trolling the programme. One I saw featured a couple with a fairly bog standard suburban house in Maidenhead who somehow had over a million to spend on their move. They were desperate for a lot of land even though, when asked whether they knew how big an acre was, neither had any clue. They didn't really know what they wanted to do with the land beyond talking vaguely about ecology and having alpacas and hens. They had zero farming experience. When shown something with a mere 5 acres they sneered at it, were pretty keen on something with 50 acres, and then were shown a house that seemed to tick every single box with a more sensible 14 acres. And, at the end, with the presenter pretty sure they were going to go for that one, they turned it down flat and said they didn't know what it was, it just wasn't right. I thought the presenter might strangle them, and no-one could have blamed him.

@Pobblebonk
I too often wondered about surveys being done on homes on A Place in The Sun.
i presume they have all been properly surveyed beforehand.
What also makes me is when they have a large family who intend to visit and the purchasers only want one or two bedrooms. There are only so many sofa beds you can put in a tiny living room/ dining room/ kitchen.
Some participants don't buy even though a perfect property "match" has been found for them.
Or leave the perfect property behind because they won't go the extra £2000 even though it's under the maximum limit they had to spend at the start of the show.

For me it's the other way round - the people with grown-up families who insist they still need several bedrooms from when their offspring have come to visit. They have often moved a long way away from their families, how much time do they realistically think they will spend visiting? And is it really worth the extra expense and the general upkeep costs to have a house that two of you rattle around in most of the time just for that? I think I'd be inclined to go for what suited me and if hordes of family wanted to visit I'd have details of local hotels and B&Bs available.

Totally separate niggle: the number of men who feel it necessary to shepherd their partners when they're looking round properties by putting a hand on their backs to guide them out of rooms. Why, FFS? Presumably their wives/partners have coped perfectly well all their lives walking around without being shepherded. It really gets quite jarring.

@Winniewonka

I wish I had a pound for every time someone on these types of programmes says " I love this open plan, I can just imagine myself cooking here in the kitchen whilst Bettie is sitting at the table doing her homework and Hugo is running in and out of the garden" (through the bifold patio doors) or if they haven't children "I love this open plan, I can just imagine myself cooking here in the kitchen whilst chatting to friends. If the buyers don't suggest it themselves, you can guarantee the presenters will say " Can you imagine yourself cooking here......."

Grrrr!!

I wonder how that turned out in lockdown?

“I hate this open plan, I couldn’t have imagined drudge cooking whilst Bettie is under my feet and Hugo is running in and out of the garden screaming and shrieking and Greg is manspreading all over the kitchen island because he’s wfh and I wish, oh I wish, we’d never let Kirstie take that bloody wall down, and that we didn’t buy near that pretty river when it just keeps raining.”

I love the fact that Kristy wants to knock lots of walls down and people aren't scared about doing it any more.

I am a Structural Engineer so it brings in plenty of business for me.

Love the show. Always have.

[quote LadyEloise]**@Pobblebonk
I too often wondered about surveys being done on homes on A Place in The Sun.
i presume they have all been properly surveyed beforehand.
What also makes me is when they have a large family who intend to visit and the purchasers only want one or two bedrooms. There are only so many sofa beds you can put in a tiny living room/ dining room/ kitchen.
Some participants don't buy even though a perfect property "match" has been found for them.
Or leave the perfect property behind because they won't go the extra £2000 even though it's under the maximum limit they had to spend at the start of the show.
[/quote]
Oh A Place in the Sun has become my lockdown guilty pleasure during longdown.

In relation to your last comment the most infuriating one I had ever seen were a couple with 5 dogs who wanted 'a project' in France where they could build a dog rescue. They were quite elderly, neither appeared to have any trades experience and certainly didn't appear to be physically able to do much labouring anyway. They also didn't seem to speak French. Their top budget was £100000 with £30000 for renovations.

First two properties were uninhabitable and needed a lot of work but they loved them and said they would live in a caravan whilst the work was done. Third one had a beautiful newly renovated cottage but a barn which needed some renovating but they could live in the cottage. They also had a grand daughter in a wheel chair and most of it was on one floor and great access for her. They really loved it and admitted to the presenter that they'd realised that they didn't want to do that much work so one and two were out and they went on to look at properties with less work to do.

Perfect Property 3 was £120000. They offered £95000 and the counter offer was £105000 but they wouldn't agree to it as their budget was £100000. Presenter tried to point out that they wouldn't need to use the whole of the £30000 for renovations as a lot less needed doing but no they couldn't go over £100000. I actually thought the presenter was going reach over the table and shake them.

I genuinely think they got cold feet about the whole plan but didn't want to admit it.

I also get very frustrated at all the elderly people or people with health issues wanting to move to Spain especially when they don't speak the language.

Also ones where the person has never actually been to the place that want to buy in. There was one the other day in Barbados where the retired couple had a very healthy budget but had never been there. They turned down the perfect property because the living room might be a bit small when their adult children and partners came to visit. Again I think they changed their mind after getting a free holiday.

The trouble is that there are always properties on LLL that they include despite the buyers saying quite clearly that they don't want X,Y,Z. So they'll drag them off to view a property with barely an acre when they clearly said they have horses, or to a bigger house than was asked for but it is by a noisy road, or to a bigger house that has everything but is miles away from their target area. Having criticised it I think it is a good exercise in getting people to hone in what is really important, rather than ticking everything off their 30+ list of must haves. When we were last searching we had a budget of 1.5. which ought to have been fantastic but everything we saw over 4 years of searching didn't meet our criteria despite deliberately having a relatively small list of 'must haves'. So because our location was perfect we ended up staying put and extending and now it's our forever home.

The one that got me cross on A Place In the Sun was one where it was a choice between a property in Cornwall or one on one of the Balearics. The Cornwall property was more expensive but they acknowledged that that was cancelled out by the costs of moving to Spain, local taxes, higher education and health costs, and costs for their family of travelling out to see them. However, what they did not factor in was that the extra they spent on the Cornwall property would be a growing investment whereas what they paid out in terms of extra costs of the island place would be dead money that they would never recover.

Ultimately they went for the island, and it was pretty obvious that they were seduced by going there when the weather was good and by being shown properties with swimming pools etc. But, even without the financial issue, I wanted to shout at them "It's a bloody island FGS, it's OK for the occasional holiday but you'll be bored to death and lonely within a year."

Today on A Place in the Sun, a couple with a lovely big labrador turned down two places with a garden and were looking at apartments with small balconies !!!
They even entertained the idea of an apartment on the sixth floor but thought they might have trouble enticing him into the lift.
I'd hate to be living next to them and the dog.

Oh I didn't realise the dog was a labrador! i imagined soe small yappy thing!

Yes a 6 floor apartment with a balcony is not a good place for a big dog.