‘Come on, let’s get a move on with filling in all the forms and we could have this done and dusted in three weeks!’ the estate agent bellowed at me down the phone.
‘Are you perhaps confusing the sale of my house with your Tesco delivery?’ I said. But in spite of myself, I took on board what the agent was saying, and I believed it was possible that in three weeks’ time I would be moving house. Nine weeks later, I wonder why I did that.
Perhaps it was because a terrible disorientation seems to descend when one is going through the moving business. The impending upheaval and ever more complex to-do list grows impossibly, and it starts to make one feel quite queasy, as though one were being tossed about on a rough sea.
It doesn’t help to have a spiky-haired fellow in a tight suit screaming down the phone at you, but by the time you are under offer you are too weak to argue.
I cannot provide them with flood prevention works I’ve done when I don’t have any flood to prevent
I realise, of course, that the agent was giving me his standard pep talk to hurry me through all the form-filling because it has become a nightmare. Since I last sold a property seven years ago, the process seems to have become entirely bogged down by firms selling electronic searches which bear no resemblance to reality.
So a buyer effectively goes backwards through the conveyancing process, from a point where he has visited and seen the house, and had a qualified surveyor go round to vouch for its structural integrity, to a point where his solicitor is staring boss-eyed at gobbledygook generated by geeks who have never visited the property, but have made computers spew out risk assessments claiming all sorts of disasters are theoretically possible if various environmental factors come together in ways they never have.
The Environment Agency has my house in a low flood risk area, for example, but the buyers have found a firm that has been able to come up with it being in a high-risk area, possibly by widening the search circle encompassing my cottage so that it goes beyond the bone dry village green east and west to take in the North Sea on one side and the Irish Sea on the other.
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