What is trying to buy a house like? In the US, it’s like almost any major purchase: make sure you have the cost (in currency or mortgage), agree a price, sign a contract, boom you’re a homeowner. In this, as in many other things, life in England differs.
Trying to buy a house in England is like trying to watch a cricket match with baseball rules in your head. Nothing makes any sense.
In England, you the buyer have nobody on your team. The estate agent works for the buyer; the mortgage broker works for the mortgage lender; you work twice as hard to avoid freaking out from illogic and anxiety.
We liked The Perfect House, so although it was listed for more than we wanted to pay, we told the estate agent we were interested. They indicated that there was already an offer, but that it was… complicated. Later, they communicated to us the report that maybe it would be worth making an offer, maybe for a little more than the asking price. OK, we reason, we might be able to draw the sellers with a sweet, sweet, over the asking price offer. We intimated that willingness to the estate agent, who asked us to make a formal offer. O…kay. We took a deep breath and made them a formal offer, complete with giving the estate agents not just the mortgage broker’s certified offer to cover what we don’t pay in cash. The estate agents (who work for the sellers, remember) now know more about us than the NHS or the Home Office.
If the estate agent were to accept our offer, we would then have to find a conveyancer, which sounds like a highwayman or a prestidigitator or a mountebank. I will not comment on the applicability of any of those terms, except to say that the conveyancer is yet another mediator (who needs paying) who makes sure the transaction is fully legal.
And then, there are the chains. Margaret and I are unchained buyers, which is good, but on the other hand any given property purchase may be subject to ‘an onward chain’ which means that any time an evil spirit has a bit of indigestion, they can scotch a housing purchase which means those intending buyers’ plans are disrupted, which means that they can’t vacate for the people who intended to buy their house, and so on until it gets back to Margaret and me, who just want to find a place into which to retire. Take our money.
We’ve decided that we will more or less give up on the house for which we made an offer, and simply withdraw the offer if we find another that appeals to us. So we continue visiting, looking over, making polite excuses to the earnest estate agent who shows us a house in which five e slovenly young bachelors currently live. Or conversing politely with the young family who occupy a very reasonable house, that just didn’t knock us out. Keep looking. Watch out for chains. Keep looking. Anything can happen, any time. Don’t think about the conveyancer. Keep an eye on the estate agents; they are not your buddies, they work for the sellers. And prepare to wait months even if your offer is accepted — longer if you’re still trying to find a house on which you can whole-heartedly make an offer.
We don’t care to move back to the States, and we deplore ex-pats’ moaning about how much they miss X or Y. Still, the radical indeterminacy of home-buying in England beggars imagination.