Limbo

We challenged the landlord. What that meant is that I gradually convinced my conflict-averse husband to advocate for our interests instead of the landlord's, and we did that tedious thing that we always do for any delicate email negotiation, in which we each write a draft and then I try to combine them, and then we each write new drafts based on that combination and I combine those, etc. (I'm not exaggerating. This is what we do. Drives me mad, but I've learned that trying to hurry TH along on anything is a false economy.)

To our surprise, the landlord simply said, "okay, I'll have the estate agents issue a formal notification," and that's the last we've heard on anything. So...the estate agents ought to know that the current notification period (DDTC) is six months, right? Or, because all estate agents are terrible, they've found some loophole that'll keep it to two? Or one? Dunno. I'm bracing for bad news and/or possibly infected strangers to be trouped through our house on very little notice.

We also made an offer on Pelican House on Friday, and have not heard a peep back. This is not terribly surprising, since we're being forced to use The Worse Estate Agents on Earth, also known as Connells. Seriously -- I called them up about 20 minutes after the listing came on the market and asked to see it. An audibly gum-snapping teen with one of the most irritating accents I've yet experienced here ran through what was obviously a script with me, hard-selling their mortgage services.

"I'm not going to use your mortgage services," I said. "I can say that with 100% confidence. Can I please just see this house?"

"What's your maximum price?"

"I'd rather not say. The listed price is well within budget."

"Well, the sellers are only interested in serious buyers. We'll need some proof you can afford it."

"Seriously? What do you want, a screenshot of a bank balance?"

"Yeah, that'd be good."

"Well, that's ridiculous. I just want to see it; I'm not making an offer yet."

"But you didn't give a maximum price. So we don't know if you can afford it."

"But that would just be something I'd say--. Never mind. Okay. My maximum price is twelve million. Can I go look at it?"

The conversation ended with me hyperventilating -- I hate calling estate agents because we have trouble with each other's accents and I don't know the norms and I'm always terrified that something exactly like what happened on this call will happen -- and angrily telling her "you know what? Just forget it!" and hanging up. I eventually wrote a nasty email to the company saying that if they actually had any intention of, y'know, trying to sell the property, I was free the next day, and I got a call back from someone with a better accent who did not apologize and scrupulously avoided mentioning what just happened and booked us in to see the house without accusing us of being window-shopping time-wasters.

Anyway: long story short, I'm not shocked that they're ignoring our attempt to buy the house. Also, I really hate this agency.

Meanwhile, yesterday we tried out our alternative strategy of buying a house for cash. We found the likeliest prospect -- in a neighborhood a little farther out than we were previously considering, and clearly needing some work, but an okay size and a cute exterior.

The estate agent avoided eye contact when we arrived. "I'll just let you wander," she said, and explained that it was a post-death sale and that the son had moved in and "he's fallen on hard times. It's quite a sad story, really." The house was funereally dark, with the only light evading the thick velvet curtains managing to illuminate the heavily-textured low ceilings. The sitting room was bi-level. Not sunken; it just had a random staircase in it. Heaps of clothes were piled everywhere, along with empty soda bottles on the floor and jumbo opened packages of the British equivalent of cheese doodles. None of the kitchen cabinets closed, and the end one was crumbling into a pile of sawdust. The upstairs was covered in scrofulous carpeting. The toilet seats were up and vigorously expelling sewer gas from their scaly and discolored exteriors, which competed with a dank pervasive fug of cigarette smoke  and despair that permeated every porous surface. Someone had tried to cover it with harsh detergents, with the resulting scent being uncannily the exact smell of a neglected American 1950's cheap motel room with flat quilted pink bedspreads. A smoke detector chirped dejectedly. Being American and thus needing to find something positive to say, I remarked "gosh, that's a nice big water tank," to the agent as we fled, approximately four minutes after we arrived. 

We had some time to kill before the next appointment, so we walked by a listing we were meant to see but that had gone under offer the day before, and we easily confirmed that we would not have wanted it. We arrived at our next appointment early and encountered the owner, Phil, who was showing it. He had another appointment first, so we said we'd take a walk around the neighborhood and return. We walked around the back of the property, craning our neck to try to make out where the detached house ought to sit, presumably in the gardens of the solid row of terraced houses before us.

"Surprisingly small lot," I remarked. "Where is it?"

The inescapable conclusion was that it wasn't. We pulled up the listing and tried to work out what kind of unholy photographic wizardry made the house appear not to be attached to the ones next to it. And also gave it the impression of having a 15-foot orangery? Working through all the hypotheses -- the house in front of us had a detached annex, as did the one we were expecting to find; was the orangery maybe on the annex? Was it like a Spinal Tap Stonehenge? -- we eventually arrived at the correct one, which is that there were two listings on this particular street and the agent had simply disregarded my use of the keywords "the detached house for sale at [price point]." We dissolved in laughter at this point, despite the complete waste of the afternoon (and yes, Connells is actually worse than these guys, but we are also not terribly happy with these guys). We then went back to Phil and relayed what had happened. He was a bit confused, but his wife explained to him, "the agents -- they've done it again."

Result: utterly pointless house-hunting day. As of now, Sunday evening, we have no idea how long we can remain in the rental, no idea whether our offer has been accepted (or even relayed), and no prospects for moving. Keeping the perspective that things could be a lot worse (I am also simply waiting for my jab; the qualifying age is now within five years of my own), this is nonetheless an intensely frustrating time of becalm-ment, made more annoying by knowing that when things do start to happen, they will undoubtedly get a lot worse before they get better.

Panic! At the Discoed

I actually do have a bunch of non-housing-related posts teed up, but I've been absolutely buried on assignment, putting together a 14,000-word draft for something else. True, the project was self-assigned, but that doesn't make it any less important -- indeed, I'm slowly coming to realize that those are the only important ones. 

I also really wanted to use this title. ("Discoed" is a town in Wales. Where we might soon be living. Stay with me, here.)

Things have been going really well lately. My physical strength and stamina are verrrrrry slowly returning from a presumed encounter with COVID last month (or just some other virus that sucker-punched me; I didn't get tested, and the symptoms weren't an exact match); I'm starting to work through my abject terror of unstructured time and it is beginning to dawn on me just how much I enjoy my new and completely intoxicating freedom (yes, even in "lockdown"); and, coming up on my one-year anniversary of (accidentally) moving to England and living, for the first time, with my husband, I continue to marvel at just how absurdly lucky I've been in love.

Great time to get a text from the landlord summarily telling us to vacate the house by the end of the month, eh?

I mean, health and husband mean I'm still doing superbly on balance -- don't get me wrong -- but it's hard to overstate just how shite this is. The average home purchase, pandemic NOT factored in, takes more than three months from start to finish. We cannot buy before eviction. If we go into another rental now, we're out of the market for another year. If prices continue to rise as forecast, our buying power will slip further, and we can barely afford the sort of place we want now as it is.

I've spent the day in a kind of panicked stupor (was supposed to be doing my taxes today, so there might have been a slight bias toward procrastination anyway). We could challenge the landlord -- I mean, I suppose we'll pretty much have to, as there also aren't any suitable rentals on the market right now, and there's fairly unambiguous government guidance preventing short-notice property repossessions during lockdown. Still, I'd prefer things not to get nasty, and I'd also prefer he not exercise his right to troop potential (and potentially Brazilian-variant-carrying) buyers through our space. And, too, lockdown is easing soon -- not sure whether these tenant protections will likewise ease.

We could buy quickly if we bought for cash. We don't have a lot of cash, but it'd get us something in the suburbs. Or in Wales. 

Rentals are so incredibly depressing -- houses for sale in this area tend to be dreary enough, and rentals are the ones that are too ghastly to sell -- that even a modest cash-bought one would likely be nicer. And, of course, we'd hopefully benefit from the rising prices and thus preserve our purchasing power when we come back to the market in a couple years' time. 

Or, we could put in a mortgage-able offer on one of the properties we've been considering lately -- Pelican House, or the Clevedon cottage. Or the one in Wales. It wouldn't go through quickly, but if we can get an offer accepted somewhere very soon, there's a good chance of completion before the additional notice we extract from our landlord expires.

None of this is ideal. The damn market has absolutely disappeared in the last few months. I've tracked it for over a year -- normal active volume is around 10,000 listings for the area in a 10-mile radius from the city. It currently stands at 1,383. I just know in my bones that pent-up supply is about to burst forth, probably temporarily depressing prices while it firehoses out, and we're gonna be shut out of it, and that really sucks.

Truly first-world problems -- believe me, I appreciate that -- but deeply frustrating and unhappy-making nonetheless. Westward, probably, ho.

(Not really. That's in Devon.)