Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Real life | 19 January 2017

One more ludicrous question from my buyer and I swear I am going to pull out

issue 21 January 2017

If the buyer asks me any more questions I am going to pull out. I have to put my foot down somewhere or this is going to drag on indefinitely.

I went under offer some months ago now and it was thought I might be in my dream cottage for Christmas. Ha! The next prevailing theory was that I would be in by the end of January. That’s a laugh too.

After various legal nightmares to do with disputed rights of way, unmade shared- access tracks and windows in neighbouring properties facing the wrong way, the purchase of the country cottage is good to go.

The problem is the other end. The buyer of my London flat, while bombarding me with demands to hurry up or she will pull out, refuses to rein in her lawyers, who are daily deluging my lawyer with lists of impossible questions about arcane aspects of my property that he and I couldn’t answer if we took a year out and dedicated ourselves to the task.

The latest questions came in during the holiday period, so well done to whichever keen young legal eagle spent their break scrutinising the paperwork, needlessly finding fault with it. My solicitor suspects a work-experience flunky. He thinks the buyer’s solicitor, while snoozing in holiday mode, made the mistake of letting a trainee or eager young intern have a look at the files to see if the grown-ups had missed anything.

The result is an impertinent array of pointless queries which are either so obvious they are answered in the estate agents details, or which are so unutterably unanswerable that if all house sales depended on them the market would crash this week and no property would be traded again, prompting a total and utter meltdown of the financial markets.

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