25 Aug 2009
My apologies for the brief hiatus, a very close friend has just lost his battle against cancer and my attention has been, understandably I hope, drawn away from house buying.
Mike Wilkinson 6-10-59 / 24-08-09 R.I.P.
As an aside, anyone on the Costa del Sol who is in a charitable frame of mind could do a lot worse than supporting Cudeca, a fantastic organisation helping terminal cancer sufferers, who need all the help that they can get.
But, as they say, back to business.
Unfortunately I once again have to rage against estate agents. I was contacted last week by a friend who had seen a property advertised that she thought might suit us and very kindly sent us through the details.
During a quick scan of the net I came across the selfsame property being touted by no less than three agents and here’s the strange thing, each of the property descriptions were completely different. The only thing they could seem agree upon was the photos or, I must admit, I would have been difficult to convince that they were indeed talking about the same place.
Is it now 3 bedrooms or 5? 1 or 2 bathrooms? 200, 800 or 1000 square meters of ground? Don’t ask me! Confused? I certainly am.
Of course, and I should be used to this by now, the emails I fired off requesting more information came back, how shall I put this delicately, less than satisfying, perhaps?
But what struck me is this, how is it possible that one property can be written about in such widely differing ways? Are there no standards? I mean how difficult can it be to count rooms, surely not something you need a degree in advanced mathematics to do correctly and a tape measure is, I am reliably assured, not an instrument of high level technology.
I believe that we are all aware of the poetic licence taken by agents when their somewhat flowery description of a properties charms tend to hijack their common sense and ones ability to read between the lines becomes honed by countless repetitions of meaningless praising of views and locations but please, why should accuracy be totally thrown out of the window when it comes to such a simple thing as the number of rooms? Is it possible that they think that we cannot count either?
And now we come to the serious point. If an agent cannot or will not represent a property accurately how on earth can they expect me, the prospective purchaser, to take a single word that they say with anything other than a very large pinch of salt?