The opportunity

I use Rightmove like a social media platform. I’m interested to see what’s for sale where I live, and to peek into people’s houses that I wouldn’t ordinarily get to see.

I spotted something interesting on Christmas Eve. You don’t see many houses going on the market at that time of year, and there was something odd about a house having its listing photos taken with Christmas trees in it, more than one, in fact. So there it was: a house for sale on a road I had stored in my mind as one of the fancier ones in our area, at a listing price of £850k. A lot of money, but having renovated our house and extended it over the years, I thought maybe it was just about doable.

I didn’t show it to Jon immediately. Like many of my ideas, I sat on it for a few days, working it through in my mind: the possibilities, the risks, and how to sell it to him. I looked at sold prices for others on the road over the years, and checked the planning portal to see how others had been changed and extended. Often with these ideas, I go through this kind of process of weighing it all up, and those few days are enough for the interest to wane and I can move on. For some reason this house was different. Perhaps it was the Dutch gable, which felt so striking, or the fact that it was semi-detached. So I rang the estate agents just to find out more, and ended up booking us in for a viewing on 10th January.

I showed Jon the house. He was mildly interested, and I mentioned I’d booked to view it. Keep it casual, I thought. It will be interesting; how often do you get to go inside one of these houses?

The day before the viewing, the agents rang to let me know that the house was actually two flats. Confused, I asked what that actually meant for buying it, and was told we would need cash to buy one outright and a mortgage for the other. What? I have to buy one with cash? I can’t do that. I cancelled the viewing and told Jon. He was surprised I’d cancelled. “You do know that if we sold our house, we’d have enough money to buy one of the flats outright?” I’d thought cash meant literal cash in the bank. I hadn’t considered the equity in our house as cash. Before getting carried away, I rang our mortgage company to check. I explained it was one house split into two flats, and that we’d use the sale of our house to buy one outright and move our mortgage onto the other. They said that was doable. So I rang back and reinstated the appointment. Suddenly it made much more sense that there had been multiple Christmas trees in the listing, and two kitchens. I can’t believe I hadn’t put it together.

We got to the house at 10am, along with what seemed like 20 other people. I hated the feeling of somehow being in competition with them. The house was worse than I’d imagined from the listing. They bleach out all the highlights in the photos so everything looks bright, clean and blemish-free; in reality it was dark, dank and in need of serious modernisation. The flats were being rented out and both tenants were there, which made it feel like we were intruding on their homes.

We viewed each flat separately, with an agent in each one. They told us a couple had owned it for 25 years, renting out the flats, and now wanted to sell. They wanted someone to buy both with a view to converting it back into a house. Strange, I thought, that they had this wish. How could they make someone do that?

We left thinking it was horrible inside, but the plot and the external features felt so grand. It was like the inside just didn’t match the outside. It didn’t make much sense, but the opportunity for it to be something amazing, to live up to its handsome looks, was too great for me. Let’s offer the asking price and see what happens.

Obviously we all know how house buying goes; it’s rare to offer the asking price and get a house in London. So it went to best and finals, and we were told we were in a weak position because we hadn’t put our house on the market. We ummed and ahhed about what to offer. I put together a huge spreadsheet with different amounts: what we could afford depending on how much we sold our house for, and how much stamp duty and fees would be at every price point. I even asked Claude for advice on the psychology of numbers. None of these calculations took into account that the house probably needed £400k spending on it. That was a problem for another day.

We offered £872,500 and won. It’s hard to say whether we felt excited or anxious, but winning pleased me. As it happened, all the other bidders were in the same position as us: no one had their house on the market. So there was just one condition. We had to list our house, and accept an offer on it, within two weeks.