Foreign Perspectives

We’ve had our place listed with several estate agents for a while now and had sort-of settled into the thinking that it would sell “sometime” but probably not that soon.

These days, you get a lot of “window shoppers” when you’re trying to get a decent price for your place and we’ve had our share of those through normal estate agents.

However, one estate agent that we listed with some time ago and heard nothing from since got in touch last week to see about a visit on Saturday. They’d said at the outset that they pre-vet purchasers to the extent of checking in advance not only what they’re looking for but also that they’ve got the resources to pay for it and made a point of saying that they’d only be around with “serious buyers”.  Total estate-agent speak if ever there was an example of it we thought.

The call was surprising on several fronts. We’d not heard from them in ages so figured that they’d forgotten about us which was a shame as we’d originally thought that they would be the people who’d sell it for us. More surprising in some ways was that the appointment was for Saturday morning: I always figured that estate agents were strictly Monday to Friday people but apparently not.

Although our place is pretty large, usually we’d people round it in maybe an hour and then a little chat afterwards. These people were here well over two hours and were only asking the kind of questions that you’d ask if you were pretty serious about a place: can we buy that land for a pool?, can we build on that section? and so on.

We still don’t know if they’ll buy the place as they’d seen several other places in the area but the estate agent was talking of getting an architect in to see how much the changes they’d like would cost. If they run to that, I think we may need to start preparing for a fairly quick move as they seemed very proactive.