I haven't updated my site in a few months now as, at long last, we have moved house and I've been somewhat tied up with that. I say at long last because it has taken a year almost to the day to happen and has been one of the most stressful things we have ever done.
Most people think of students as being noisy, dirty drunks but in all honesty all the students that were living close to us where perfectly quite and nice people it was just that the property developers where starting to drive house prices down in the area and this coupled with the fact that 1/2 mile away Brighton council were going to be building a recycling plant meant that we thought we should get out now whilst we still could. Our first problem was that we had no idea how much our house was worth so we got three Estate Agents over to value it for us of which Fox & Sons not only gave the highest valuation but also the best sales pitch and gave us the strong impression that they could sell our house very quickly to the point where the manager said "I wouldn't be surprised it this sells in a few days". Now that we had a figure it was time to see what we could get for our money.
Some friends of ours had recently bought a house in Shoreham-By-Sea which was not only a good size but a good price and an easy walk to the station which was essential for me being that I still work in North London. Walking around Shoreham, especially the village area we really liked it and registered with a few estate agents but the only properties that seemed to be within our price range were either too small, too far from the station or just plain horrible. At this point we remembered that some friends of ours who live in Worthing had always said how affordable houses where there so off we went to see for ourselves.
Neither of us knew Worthing very well so we just headed for the center of town and walked into the first Estate Agents we found, told them what we were after and our budget and walked out with armfulls of property details! It almost felt that we could afford to buy two houses in Worthing as the prices where that low. However we soon realised why the prices of many of these houses was so low. Worthing is basically split down the middle giving you East Worthing and West Worthing, East Worthing is a lot more industrial than West Worthing, is not served as well by trains to London, doesn't fall into the catchment area of the better schools and is basically just not as nice as West Worthing. All of the houses we had been given the details of where in East Worthing. Back to the drawing board.
On our next trip we decided to start our search from the area that our friends lived in that being Tarring. We were shown a couple of very nice houses which where very close to the station and within our budget that were very tempting but not quite right for us and just when we were beginning to loose hope we saw the details of one house in the window of Jacobs Steel and immediately thought "this could be the one". Sure enough within 10 seconds of entering the house we knew we had found our new home, now it was just a case of buying it!
I admit that we did go about this the wrong way, we should have put our house on the market before going to view properties but we had initially planned to just see what we could get for our money first to see if it was worth the hassle of moving. We simply hadn't planned on finding the ideal house first. So anyway, we put in an offer which was accepted and phoned Fox & Sons and told them to put our house on the market straight away which they did and said that they were sure that they would get a lot of viewings for us and that it was now just a waiting game. So we waited, and waited, and waited. In total we waited for 6 months for Fox & Sons to try and sell our house during which time they managed to get us a grand total of 3 viewings. Yes 3 viewings in 6 months! Due to the contract we had with Fox & Sons we could not go to another Estate Agent and just had to rely on them and so we badgered them and asked why they weren't getting anyone in, why we hadn't had any offers, was the price too high, should we drop our price, should we redecorate etc etc? To which all we ever got in response was "we don't recommend dropping the price and redecorating won't make any difference". Of course during this time the people we were buying from got cold feet and took their property off the market but did say that when we found a buyer they would proceed again.
Six months later our contract with Fox & Sons expired and finally we were free from the most incompetent estate agent we have ever had the misfortune to deal with and one I can safely say that we will never use again. The day after our contract expired we contacted another estate agent that had actually sold us this house a few years earlier, Wyatts & Son. They came over and listened to how awful Fox & Sons had been and then did a valuation. Their valuation was substantially lower than the one Fox & Sons had given which we hadn't told them and seriously threatened our budget. To confirm this valuation we got 2 other estate agents to value our house which pretty much confirmed that Fox & Sons had over inflated their valuation just to get the instruction from us, yet another nail in their coffin for us.
We were now is a position where we had made an offer on the house of our dreams based on a valuation that we were never going to even remotely achieve, so we were faced with the decision of pulling out and staying where we were or accept that instead of reducing our mortgage we were going to have to increase it. We decided to proceed and instructed Wyatts and Son to put our house back on the market. What a difference a good estate agent makes, whereas Fox & Sons got us 3 viewings in 6 months Wyatts & Son got us 3 viewings in 2 days and 8 by the end of the first week.
Three weeks after being back on the market with Wyatts and Son we got an offer but it was too low. A few days later we received another offer from a property developer which was again low but as we were now terrified of loosing the house of our dreams, it was one we felt we had to accept. Finally we had a buyer and could actually start the ball rolling! We phoned the agent for the house we were buying and told them we had a buyer and were ready to proceed but he said that the vendors now wanted more money! We were already at the absolute ceiling of our budget and didn't know what to do. After over 6 months of stress we were finally in a position to buy the house but now this was going to be scuppered unless we could come up with a deal that was acceptable to all. After a few days of going over and over our figures, working out where we could make any further savings we put in our revised offer which, thankfully was accepted. The move was on!
We instructed our solicitor who started the searches, we paid for the survey on the house we were buying, the people we were buying from found a vacant property in just a few days and got their survey done and then we got a phone call from our solicitor who told us that she had just received all the forms from our buyers solicitor with a note attached saying that the purchase was no longer taking place! This was the first we had heard of this, frantically we phones Wyatts & Sons who also knew nothing about this and they tried to phone our buyer direct but he wasn't taking any calls. For nearly two days this continued before Wyatts were finally able to get through to him where they found out that he had decided to pull out because he had seen another property a few thousand cheaper! Well thanks a bunch! Our chain had now technically collapsed, we were about to loose our dream home and be nearly £800 out of pocket from the survey that was now irrelevant.
Wyatts really came to the rescue though as within minutes of finding that our 'buyer' had pulled out they were back on the phones and within 48hrs had secured us another buyer who was also a cash buyer and wanted to proceed as quickly as possible thus ensuring the chain did not collapse.
Just over a month ago we finally moved into our dream home and I have to say that it was worth it but I still maintain that I will never use Fox & Sons ever again and would also seriously think twice about selling to a property developer.
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