As the estate agent took me from one beautiful, quiet room to another in the five-bedroom period property, I gazed at its ornate cornices, original fireplaces and sash windows, my heart racing. This was “the one.” The house I had dreamed of living in with my husband, Ed, and our six-year-old son, Rafferty.
However, I had no intention of even making an offer, much less buying it. For a start, £950,000 was at least £250,000 more than our budget. Not that I’d let a little thing like money get in the way of my secret hobby.
Some people visit art galleries or museums, but my guilty pleasure is looking at houses I will never buy. Since my son started school last September, freeing up my schedule, I have seen about 30 houses that are for sale, despite having no intention of moving.
Rightmove had long been a source of escapism for me in the evenings or for a quiet half hour at the weekend. From run-down or extravagant houses to stunning and vast ones, I studied them all, imagining myself living there, hosting dinner parties in grand dining rooms and summer soirées in lush gardens.
It seemed like a natural progression to go from seeing them on screen to seeing them in person.
The first house I visited was similar to our £600,000 four-bedroom Victorian semi on the outskirts of Somerset, but it was a bargain price as it required major renovations.
As I wandered around, I felt a frisson of excitement as I imagined all the things I would do to improve the house, a feeling that quickly became strangely addictive. Since then, there are days when I have seen several properties in a row, although I can go weeks at a time without seeing one when I am too busy with my work as a forensic photographer.
The serial house viewer never buys the properties she sees, but still gets excited when imagining how to combine the interiors with her own home (archive image)
Part of the thrill is fooling the agents. Measures like asking for proof of a mortgage offer in principle or that your own home is on the market are designed to filter out time-wasters like me. If you don’t check those boxes, some agents won’t give you airtime, like the one who asked me to provide pay stubs to prove our monthly income and an email from a mortgage provider. I didn’t follow through with that visualization.
That’s why I’ve become an expert at telling stories: ‘I’ve had an inheritance so we don’t need to sell’, ‘I’m returning to the UK from abroad’ or, best of all, ‘I’m going through a painful marital breakup. The latter always guarantees that an agent won’t delve any deeper: the last thing they want is to have a hysterical, heartbroken woman on their hands.
And I have implemented certain measures to avoid raising too many red flags. It’s human nature to make assumptions about people’s wealth – and what they can afford – so I tend not to look at houses that are more than £300,000 worth more than mine, not least because it would raise suspicions when I would stop in front of millions of dollars. pounds accumulated in my Volvo.
Call it a schoolgirl mistake, though, but I once booked showings with two agents whose offices are on the same street, but I told them different stories, forgetting that most of them talk to each other despite being in competition. This generated an unusual number of follow-up questions before the viewings, which took place in the same week. In the end, I canceled them, promising to clear up my story in the future.
While others wax lyrical about their hobbies (do cyclists and runners do anything else?), I keep mine a secret, aware that most people would probably hate me for it.
Buying and selling homes are emotional topics, and I’ve nodded in false empathy while my friends complain about the amount of cleaning and preparation that goes into getting a home ready to view. Not that it bothers me. In my opinion, I’m doing sellers a favor by giving them a kick in the butt to get their homes spotless for genuine showings.
That said, I recently experienced my first pang of guilt when I saw my most fabulous property to date: a beautiful stone cottage in a village near Bath that I could never afford. I was seduced by its crooked floors and ceilings and its several hundred years of history. Unusually for this price range, older homeowners made the viewing because the agent was unavailable, which presented a dynamic I hadn’t encountered before.
She tends not to look at houses that are more than £300,000 over the value of her home, as it would raise suspicions when she pulls up to piles of millions of pounds in a Volvo.
When the sweet elderly couple explained to me that their house had been on the market for over six months and how desperate they were to sell it so they could downsize it to something more manageable, I hesitated. Their sense of hope that I might be the one to finally buy it and allow them to move on with their lives was palpable and I momentarily felt a little terrible.
With roses and apple trees in its garden, the outside was as impeccably presented as the inside, which also made me think about the amount of time and effort it must have taken a couple who were in their 70s to prepare it for me. look around. Still, it’s a short-term stress that people will get over fairly quickly. The whole moving experience is stressful regardless of me showing up, so it wasn’t enough to discourage me.
I saw another property a week later, and any embarrassment I may have felt was negated by the fact that the agent showed me around, giving me a sense of detachment.
Why do I enjoy looking at houses so much? I love seeing how a property is made to feel like a home rather than bricks and mortar, and piecing together a family’s history from the personal items you see.
It’s also the perfect way to gather ideas for our own renovations. Wood paneling has been a big recent trend in interiors and I’ve seen many examples, both dreamy and sad. We started saving up to install versions of the most beautiful examples I’ve seen in our own home, as they can look very stylish while also adding interest to a space.
I blame my mother for my desire for property. As a child, I used to follow her around as she searched for properties she intended to buy. His day job was as an office manager at a law firm, but he made extra money through property, buying new houses for a snip, renovating them and then getting paid. I often joke that at 38 years old, I’ve had almost the same amount. homes as birthdays.
It was after Mum asked me to accompany her on a house-hunting trip to the south of Spain in 2018 that I got the bug to search for properties online. Since then, I’ve watched hundreds, probably thousands, before moving on to do it in real life.
I loved a property I visited in the spring (a beautiful chocolate-box cottage with a walled garden) so much so that when I put it up for sale with a different agent after six months on the market, I looked at it again. Because? It’s pure escapism.
But perhaps my most controversial visit was to a house across the street from where I live when the elderly owner died this summer. He had never been inside her house, but he was desperate to have a nosy because he knew she had lived there since she was born.
Much to the disdain of my husband, who said I had gone too far this time, I booked a visit and took an enriching look, imagining our late neighbor as a child there and what those walls had looked like all her life. during which he never married or had children.
Sadness was the feeling with which I left. He had obviously struggled to maintain the house, but there was a sense of warmth in the beautiful wooden floors and original features.
Inevitably, I’ve set foot in some dingy homes, with terrible smells and pet-scratched carpets, that have left me thinking, ‘Why am I seeing this?’ I deserve it for snooping.
Another memorable no-no was a property with carpeting in every room (including the bathrooms) and ruffled curtains in varying shades of peach on every window.
So far, nothing I’ve seen has convinced me to consider moving, although some of them that are well out of our price range would certainly have tempted me if finances had been different.
We moved into our house in 2021, after six years in our previous house, which we slowly renovated and then sold for a profit, allowing us to purchase a more spacious family property. We benefited from the post-Covid boom, as our old house was purchased after just two viewings, so I have never known the anguish of having to tidy it up repeatedly for people looking around us, or of months wondering if we would ever would be sold. Although our current house is certainly not our forever home, we will be staying here for a while.
However, I will continue with my voyeuristic visualizations. I have just seen an advert in a local fashion magazine for an exclusive private development of ten new build executive homes near us priced from £1.2 million to £1.6 million.
As show homes, which basically have an open-door policy, buyers (real or fake) should be under less scrutiny, so the temptation to go see them guilt-free, without asking questions, is proving irresistible.
I might have to park my Volvo around the corner.
- As he told Sadie Nicholas. Anna Thomas is a pseudonym and names have been changed.