Pring's Blog

Feb 2013 “Physician – heal thyself”!

Many of you in Nailsea have noticed that I have now moved! Having sold over 4000 houses in my 31 years as a local estate agent, I have actually only lived in 3 houses (now 4) myself and sold my own house only once!

It’s humbling to go through it oneself and I have often found that people’s expectations when they put their house on the market and the actual timing of what happens are rarely in sync…and I was no exception!

Essentially, as soon as you put your house on the market, you expect viewings… FAST! You expect every single viewer to be proceedable and to immediately offer you the asking price, or extremely close to it. You love your house…why WOULDN’T the first viewers want to bite your arm off and pay you the asking price for it straight away?

Then comes the feedback…
“It’s perfect but the garden is 2 degrees off facing due south”. PARDON?!
“I can only fit 7 cars on the drive. When it’s our turn to have the family for Christmas Dinner every 3 years, we need parking for 8”. WHAT?!!
Or that classic old favourite…
“It’s perfect but somehow it’s just not quite right for us”. WHY NOT? “I don’t know, but when I find the “right” house I will know”. AAAARGH!!!!

Having put my house on the market at the beginning of May 2012, I expected to find a buyer within a 4 – 6 weeks and the new family would want to be in for the start of the school term in September. I had 4 viewings very swiftly. Everyone liked the house and one of them definitely wanted to buy it but couldn’t proceed. After the initial flurry of excitement, viewings dried up with only the occasional one thereafter that wasn’t serious or proceedable.

Summer came and went as did October half term – still no buyer. Then the PERFECT family for my home viewed it. They weren’t proceedable and I must admit that my heart sank a little but they instructed their local estate agent and swiftly found a buyer! Terms were agreed on November 5th (my late mother’s birthday) and we all moved at the end of January. (The builder’s surname on my new home is “Bessell” - my grandmother’s maiden name…another touch of fate?).

In the end, the delay meant that the builder had that extra time to get my new home absolutely perfect. For many other reasons too, I think the timing of the whole thing was “meant to be”… but it certainly wasn’t as I had first envisaged when I put my house on the market back in May!

Over the 31 years, sales have occasionally fallen through and seller’s hopes have taken a hit. Often though, I have seen those sellers a year later and they have said, “Do you know Steve, we are so glad the first sale never happened. We were distraught at the time but we absolutely love the home we’re in now and we wouldn’t be here if everything had gone ahead as we had first thought”.

Whether it’s fate, a higher being watching over us, or simply human spirit to make the very best of whatever situation we are in, I don’t know. What I do know is that after 4,000 sales (including 3 of my own) it WILL work out in the end. So trust to fate, trust to your god or trust to your human nature…but definitely trust your estate agent to get you moved. I did…and it worked!