HOUSE HUNTER:While the estate agent suggested that the price was negotiable, an offer that was considered too low was met with a sniffy response, writes Don Morgan
SHOULD ANYONE pay over the odds for anything? I asked myself this last week when we bid on a house in Monkstown. I thought it might have been the real deal. Well, it feels like a raw deal. The way we were treated makes me wonder if this house search is really worth the hassle.
The house was in ribbons and had about as much certainty of its stability as a tent on a rough day in Valentia. It was a bad house in a nice neighbourhood.
We were late, and arrived to find the estate agent brooding in the doorway, as his Heineken Cup final Saturday was being ruined by a pair of tyre-kickers from Carlow.
We took a look around, well aware that the asking price of €625,000 was out of our league but it was negotiable, apparently, as long as you were willing to be scolded for negotiating in the wrong direction.
The house had a number of things right with it. It’s in a cul-de-sac, 10 minutes by foot from work (including time to stop off and watch a bumblebee suck nectar out of a flower in a hedgerow, which we did afterwards).
There was a good deal of space, though the house wasn’t massive and two of the four bedrooms had barely enough room to accommodate fold-up people, let alone fold-up beds.
The back door was rotten and the kitchen it separated from the back garden didn’t exist. Unless you want to count an open fire – if only we had a cauldron, we could boil coddle all day.
Other features to this property included damp, an external wall crack below the upper front window, a flat-roofed garage with a fist-sized hole to let in fresh air and rain water (giving scope for a bucket-style water feature inside the garage then – could add a few quid to the value, that).
As in need of TLC as the house is, you could rough it as you did up your rooms one-by-one. Its aspect wasn’t perfect, but in the afternoon the back yard gets caressed with sunshine and, as the neighbours showed, anything goes in the area in terms of what you can add on.
One house, whose back end was mooning us from the front door of this house, was the landing site of a Mies van der Rohe designed spaceship.
And the commute would be a distant nightmare. So how negotiable is a price? That’s what we wanted to find out, by making what some in the property community would call making a “cheeky offer”, which lesser mortals would call committing a lot of money to a property in need of work, a life of caravan holidays and sub-Lidl everything for our groceries.
We offered €420,000 and were told later in the week of a subsequent bid of €530,000. What person in their right mind would consider besting a bid of €420,000 with a bid of €530,000? Someone who (a) might be sick of looking at their money, (b) wants to make damn sure they get the house, or (c) are operating without knowing everything. It could all be coincidence.
Bidding on the house is sometimes like waiting for a bus, when three arrive at the same time, why should one be a limousine?
The worst part of this is that the estate agent treated us in an utterly shabby way. He was cross with us when we made the bid and lectured me on the price of a much smaller house that he had sold in the area, which had gone for around €390,000.
It was around the corner, was indeed smaller, but was in better condition and had the same geographical advantages and disadvantages as this house, such as access to the Dart line and a halting site.
Whatever you do, pick your price based on your own gut instinct. Estate agents suggest, cajole, even bully a price, in order to set the agenda. But interest rates rise and stamp duty will hang around like a bad smell.
You’ll feel violated, as we did after our dealings with this particular estate agency. Which we’ll never use again if we have any luck.
