We have been viewing some houses with a view to moving. So the last 2 houses went-
1. We are being shown around by the owner, when said owners hubby comes out of the bathroom complete with rolled up newspaper. “I’d give it 10 minutes before you go in there” he says 😯
2. 2nd house, the estate agents are showing us around, and the house is a tip. So I ask ” where are the owners” reply ” she did a runner with a Turkish Waiter 2 weeks ago and left everything.”
Even the dishes, unwashed in the sink!!!

So what is the strangest thing you have ever seen (as a buyer or seller)

1: only one in that relationship wants to move house
2: lowball offer then.

Not me, but my neighbours place is for sale and they had a viewing last year 10 minutes after they got a call from the vet to say their beloved dog hadn’t made it.

She greeted the potential buyers at the door in floods of tears and barely able to speak.

Still for sale……

We visited a house which looked inside like it was inhabited by squatters. Their dog went for my 3 year old daughter making her scared of dogs ever since. The garden was like a jungle and covered in dog turds one of which I trod in then walked it through the house and up the stairs into the bedrooms. The house was a 5 bed detached in a nice street so it wasn’t what were expected to see inside.
The estate agent wasn’t remotely interested when I gave him my feedback.

Edit: None of this would put us off. The house layout was just rubbish and not what we were looking for.

We saw one like the second, tenants were being evicted, can’t imagine why, seemed like lovely people who just wanted to be left alone with their crates of Costco vodka and malting dogs.

Having a long list of “we’ll fix it before it’s sold” things. So blooming fix them, I don’t really want to be buying into your half finished projects (at a price where it really should be perfect).

So what is the strangest thing you have ever seen (as a buyer or seller)

Not as a buyer but I remember looking for a place to rent as a student in Leeds and being shown somewhere that stank really badly, where we weren’t allowed to look in either of the bedrooms, and there was a shower in the kitchen/front room! Erm… nah you’re alright thanks.

We were viewing the house we now live in, and standing in the master bedroom with the estate agent.

There was a large duvet bunched up on the bed that began to move. The estate agent jumped and let out a slight scream as the tenant (a 20-something year-old student) emerged from underneath the cover.

He just looked at us through groggy eyes, and laid back down.

We ended up getting the house for 25% less than the original asking price. 8)

We went to view a house with the estate agent, booked a couple of days before so plenty of time for the owners to have a tidy up /clean .
As we walked in the front door the stench of piss was so strong we just walked straight out again.

We had neighbours that couldn’t understand how come our house sold within the day and theirs was on for months with little interest.

Pretty much identical 12 y/o houses, and ours was dearer.

Could’ve been something to do with that you couldn’t actually see either the colour of their carpets or any surface due to clutter/crap/washing etc…

We showed someone round our old house that had a cast iron bath. The prospective owner said he would enjoy throwing a sledge hammer through it.

Me and the wife agreed that under no circumstances would we sell the house to him.

I was round Pimpmistress Jazz’s ground floor abode on Saturday morning early in our courtship and we were naked under the covers. Suddenly there was a voice outside the window which made me think ‘that sounds like Paula, the estate agent’ (I was looking at houses at the time). I mentioned it to PMissJ who said something like ‘oh bother. I had forgotten that the estate agent was popping round this morning to show prospective tenants this wonderful dwelling’.

Sure enough we heard a key slide into the Chubb (not a euphemism) and we greeted Paula and a young couple in our dressing gowns.

Don’t think they rented it, but to be fair it was a pretty shitty flat.

Massive guy, small loft hatch, tiny wife. He points at the hatch and says “I’ve never been up there”. No sheet! I have an enduring mental image of her on a stepladder trying to push him through the hatch.

Massively overgrown garden at another house. The guy hands his glass or red wine to his wife and walks into a bush. Shortly after, there’s a flush and he reappears. Fully working outside loo behind the undergrowth! Went ahead with the purchase on that one! Ideal for post ride pit stops.

We viewed one where the floor in the living room was on the piss, sloping off down into one corner.
The estate agent (who couldn’t have been more than 19 years old) tried to put a positive spin on it by saying “At least if you drop something, you know where it will end up”

Touché, salesman…

While selling my listed building, steep stairs accessed second floor flat next door to a noisy pub, the estate agent showed a disabled old lady round. I really didn’t understand that one.

Working at home one day estate agent also showed an investment buying older South African couple round who did nothing but moan about the height of the ceiling (low, but at 6ft I was still safely several inches from them) and how much they could buy in South Africa for the same price. Sooo tempted to tell them to **** off back there if it’s so **** cheap and wonderful. To his credit, the estate agent did have the good grace to apologise afterwards.

An estage agent I knew once found a man who’d hung himself whilst showing people around – managed to get out without them seeing though.

Then there’s various rubber items that are revealed when opening up fitted wardrobes.

Viewing a house we liked the look of and the owners son had obvisouly been out for a few the night before as when we were viewing he was asleep on the sofa. She had covered him right over with a blanket and asked us to ignore him while we pictured ourselves in the living room.

Another place where a batty old woman was selling a massive house at a great price, the place was covered in rubbish and the garden was covered in dog eggs. While we were viewing the upstairs one of the 3 dogs put his head under her skirt and starting licking her leg, I kid ye not, the sound was vile, like a scraping rasping licking off the hard skin from her leg. The woman just laughed and said ‘oh he always does that’ – oh so you let him do that a lot then? gross.

Then there’s various rubber items that are revealed when opening up fitted wardrobes.

Reminds me of the very visually catholic house we viewed, apart from the very gay son’s rather black S&M themed bedroom. 😯

Viewed one house where somebody had obviously broken in, got nervous and laid a huge Richard III in the middle of the carpet (apparantly it’s quite common amongst burglard). The whole house stank – we didn’t buy.

However, the house I’m currently in was an absolute tip when I viewed, lodgers kipping on mattresses on the floors, overflowing ash trays, underwear in the garden (I mean wtf 8O) etc. It had been on the market so long I managed to batter down the price, then re-decorate throughout. (One room smelled so much of cat p*ss taht the surveyor refused to enter 😡 )

Once we moved in kept getting dodgy adult catalogues through the post and debt collectors calling……………..

Being shown round houses as a kid when we were looking to move house the estate agent was in bit of a state of befuddlement. At the previous viewing the person looking round was in their early twenties – looked about, liked it then asked “so do I pay you now?” He had the asking price in cash in a carrier bag. His parents had died – that was his inheritance – he had no idea how buying and selling houses worked – but imagined you just turn up with cash and get given the keys.

According to the sales blurb, the house would make “an ideal project”. Should’ve guessed something was up when the estate agent got out of his car in wellies. Then he opened the front door and two chickens flew out…

Went to view one where we were shown around by the estate agent, walled or into the back garden to find the whole family sat in the car on the drive staring at us. Very odd. You’d at least drive round the corner surely?

Saw a property in Guildford a few years ago that was stuck in the 70’s in terms of decor (right down to avocado bath suite with matching mats), looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since the 70’s, had been smoked in since the 70’s, the owner was smoking as we were viewing, and the place was full, and I mean FULL of Elvis memorabilia….

Think we were out of there in under 5 minutes.

Most annoying one for me was a house I wanted to buy where the owner was storing silly amounts of furniture for a friend so taking up most of the floor space. As far as I could see all was fine and got the survey done – then the owner decided she couldn’t afford anywhere big enough for all the furniture she was storing so pulled out of the sale. Bit odd really.

When we married we viewed something like 53 properties so I can’t remember all the nutty owners. There was one up on the moors somewhere between Burley and Rossendale that was an old farmhouse; the back wall was falling down and the place was miserable and freezing. The poor seller, a lady whose husband had left her, had done her best by lighting a huge fire in the grate. It was quite sad.

We saw an old weaver’s cottage right beside the M65, which was just about to open, where you had to climb through a cupboard door to use the bath, which filled the entire cupboard. The main bedroom was stacked up with furniture because downstairs was being refurbished. We had been there a few minutes, peering in through the door because you couldn’t actually enter the room, when a movement over by the window attracted our attention and we noticed a bloke sitting at a table working! It was the seller’s husband, almost invisible in the clutter, marking school books. We couldn’t see how he had actually got there.

We went to view a house a few years ago, advertised as do’er-upper, it had been on the market for a few months and had just dropped in price and peeked our interest.
The front living room was completely bare, had lovely wooden floors, a boarded up fireplace, but with a 10″ hold cut into it, the ceiling light has been disconnected and new cables were attached to the ceiling and switch on the wall and there were thousands of staples in the walls, all over the walls and window frames…
Dining room was the same. Quite odd I thought, but we kept going, the agent was lovely and had helped a friend buy her place so we were casually chatting away. The kitchen was normal, lovely kids room with toys in it still though… A bit odd as the rest of the house was bare. Spare room was the same as two downstairs, littered with staples and botched wiring.. Then the penny dropped! It was a cannabis plantation! The tenants moved out in a hurry leaving all the kids stuff and the landlord and agents didn’t even bother to tidy up the place and disguise what it was.
It took a further price drop before out sold a few weeks later.

We knew from the photo’s that the house may be a bit ‘odd’ as it had a urinal in the family bathroom, next to the trap.

However when we got round the hosue was totally deserted, like they’d popped out to work, even washing in the machine, kids toys out on the floor. All very odd.

We didn’t ask what had happened.

😀 An ex landlord of mine paid me to help him take the cast iron bath from a house he was selling and put it in storage, and to replace it with a bog standard 50€ plastic thing after the buyer said the same thing. Apparently the plumber was due to come in as soon as the sale had completed to refit the bathroom. (Which was an amazing art deco type thing) The landlord spent quite some time removing other bits and pieces. Sinks, taps, toilet…….. tiles. Mirrors…

I suspect the plumber was a little pissed, as selling the stuff that had been removed would probably have doubled his profit on the job. New owner had given permission as well.

Viewed a student property where the tenants were pissed off with the letting agents just showing up, not giving any notice, so three of the four bedrooms had the floors strewn with tatty jazz mags and sex toys. The fourth was immaculate. Chatted with one of the tenants and they were apologetic but wanted to embarrass the agent into doing things properly. It seemed to work, he went crimson.

We viewed a house in Holmfirth. The owner was heavily pregnant and moving for an extra bedroom. She hadn’t been up the stairs to the top floor for a while as the stairs were too narrow and steep for her bump but that’s where her two teenage daughters’ rooms were.

That floor was like a dirty protest – dirty underwear everywhere, used ‘sanitary products’, broken windows and internal doors, graffiti on the walls etc etc. When we went to the lounge, the daughters were sitting there in their underwear.

We suspected that the girls were somewhat reluctant to move.

Oh – and the owner told us that the kitchen never got any daylight and the parking was a nightmare.

a man who’d hung himself whilst showing people around

I’d like to think I’d at least try to talk him out of it while he was showing me round.

Friend of a friend “didn’t ask”. Got told instead.
Got to the house for a viewing, grass in the back garden was ~1m tall, could still see kiddies toys and stuff in the garden. Couldn’t get in through the front door, no keys. Stuff everywhere. Same as yours pretty much. Except a lot more mold and smells.

Turns out the family had been in a fatal crash. The inheritor of the estate (one of the grandparents i suspect) didn’t want anything to do with the sale, or the house or anything. Just wanted shot of it. House hadn’t been touched for months until the estate agent turned up to sell it. No idea who bought it in the end, i suspect getting a house clearance company in first might have been sensible.

We viewed a house which was currently owned by an Indian family. They were all in the house during the viewing with the agent and it stank of their cooking but the weirdest thing was that we weren’t allowed to view one of the bedrooms. It had a hasp lock on it and was a no go room.

Who’d buy a house without first seeing all the rooms?

My funniest moment viewing house had nothing to do with the house but the estate agent, a young girl who arrived in a Golf that was making more noise than an old era F1 car.
She started by appologicing for the noice but she could not get herself to tell the boyfriend that she did not like the sport exhaust he had given her for valentines day.

Viewed the house of a divorcing couple, both were present during the viewing and clearly wanted to punch each others faces in.

The man had some kind of nose/sinus problem and sniffed about every 3 seconds. Intensely annoying, and whenever he turned his back, his wife impersonated him while pulling a massive belm 😆

Edit: thinking back, making conversation I asked about the cats they had (some kind of beautiful long haired ones). “THEY ARE HERS” was the rather terse reply with a healthy dose of superman eyelasers aimed at his wife. Wondering now if she knew he was allergic and she’d got them to shit him up.

Lots of damp and mould and general unpleasantness, but a couple that stand out…

House that was currently being let by a lovely Eastern European gentleman, landlord had it up for sale. Wasn’t quite the area we wanted but we went for a look anyway. The tenant clearly took great pride in his home and took great pains to point out to us the “repairs” he had affected not to mention the decorating. The front room – which had the curtains drawn despite it being a lovely day – was painted bright orange with a red lightbulb. Mrs Eastern European was reclining on the massive L sofa that took up 70% of the small room whilst Jr played on the Xbox at full volume in the corner. It was also hotter than the sun.

Then there was the house where the floor in the main bedroom was – genuinely – about a foot higher in the middle than the edges. When I mentioned this to the estate agent she affected a bemused look and said “oh, I hadn’t noticed”.

Viewed a house last year. We were told on the phone by the agents that the owner would show us round, but that she was a bit poorly. We were greeted by the owner, who, it turns out, was in the very late stages of terminal brain cancer. She was literally days from death. Unfortunately, the tumor was having a quite serious effect on her mental state, she was all over the place. We wanted to just go, but she insisted on showing us round and telling us all about her life. She was lovely, but she was clearly not fit to be showing people round a house. We stayed with her for nearly 2 hours, she seemed to appreciate the company and having someone to talk to, my wife is brilliant with people and we left her cheerful and (relatively) comfortable. Many phonecalls were made following the viewing, not least of which was a call to the estate agents suggesting they try a somewhat different approach to selling houses.

A friend got a house at auction in Copenhagen, it was stripped bare, wiring removed and animal shit everywhere, downstairs in the basement there were various animal enclosures, potentially for large reptiles and maybe a Croc, lots of porn left lying and I guess they gave up flushing the bog.

Owner left and fled the country with creditors chasing all the way to the airport I think…

We knew from the photo’s that the house may be a bit ‘odd’ as it had a urinal in the family bathroom, next to the trap.

Er… there’s nothing wrong with having a home urinal in the house, we have one in the downstairs loo and it’s so discrete, covered with a lid, that many visitors don’t even notice it. The reasoning is that when gentlemen use a standard WC pan to pee, they splash everywhere no matter how careful they may be.

the weirdest thing was that we weren’t allowed to view one of the bedrooms. It had a hasp lock on it and was a no go room.

That would be where they were keeping a mentally ill relative or somebody else they didn’t want you to meet. My Asian neighbour is a PC and he tells me that his community has its own way of dealing with family problems of this kind, which seldom involves Social Services.

We did view a house in a place called Hapton, a huge Georgian place you can see from the M65 overlooking a landfill site, that had been split into two homes. The place was empty but warm and clean and the owners seemed to be very nervous about their neighbour; they wouldn’t allow us to walk the wrong side of a white line painted on the flat roof and they spent a very long time pointing out the exact boundaries of their bit of the garden. We guessed they were no longer even living there and were desperate to get rid; the neighbour had a filthy Transit tipper truck parked outside his half so we guessed he was the problem. Exactly the same thing happened to us a few years into our new married with child life in the nice house we eventually bought, when a violent drug dealer moved in next door (complete with night time drug deals, huge bonfires, loud trance music and three dogs, which whined and barked outside our window all night) and we tarted the house up, put it on the market for less than it was worth and moved out fast. It was re-sold three times in the following four years.

An ex landlord of mine paid me to help him take the cast iron bath from a house he was selling and put it in storage, and to replace it with a bog standard 50€ plastic thing after the buyer said the same thing. Apparently the plumber was due to come in as soon as the sale had completed to refit the bathroom. (Which was an amazing art deco type thing) The landlord spent quite some time removing other bits and pieces. Sinks, taps, toilet…….. tiles. Mirrors…

This was a mint 1920’s bathroom. The couple that we sold it to appreciated the original features.

1976 – a house that had been a nursing home that had gone bust, been repossesed and then occupied by squatters and then empty for two years.

My parents, me and my brother and sister go to view it. Great house, six-bedrooms, 250 ft garden, lovely location but man it was a total mess inside.

The patio doors had wooden slats nailed across them just like you see boarded up windows in the movies.

The whole house stack of p*ss and there were six cans of air freshener by the front door.

You picked up one each as you entered and carried it around with you and kept on spraying. I can still smell that brand now.

Ended up buying it and my dad renovated it, he was a bit of a DIY whizz. I remember helping him knock down breezeblock walls that had been erected to create corridors in the bedrooms.

I also remember the first thing we did was pick up all the carpets and take them to the local tip in the back of our Ford Anglia estate. I was hanging my head out the window to try to get some fresh air (and the summer of 1976 was mighty hot so boy, did they hum something bad).

Took years to renovate it but my parents eventually sold it for an absolute mint.