Property crash chez Poon

It's been an interesting rollercoaster ride into 2009 so far. Some of you may know that Jon and I have been looking at properties to buy recently, with the prices coming down enough that West Hampstead where we live now and love, has actually become just about affordable. We've looked at a few places in the area and things got very real in the beginning of January when we made offers on 2 places we really liked. One we lost to another buyer, the other we haggled on and ended up agreeing a sale on, in the middle of January. We were excited about this flat. Although a small place it had some nice features and was in a lovely character building just 2 streets from where we are now, in prime South Hampstead. So we have been making plans to move and looking forward to owning our first home together.

The sale moved slowly, as in not at all, for a few weeks. After much chasing from our lawyer and the agent, we found out the seller was in the middle of an ugly split from his wife and she hadn't signed the agreement to sell and it was all being held up. The agent then spoke to the soon-to-be-ex-wife last week and she agreed to sign the papers and everything seemed to be on the move again. Except nothing happened and someone was clearly lying somewhere along the line. The agent finally told me a couple of days ago, he sensed something fishy was going on and he intended to get to the bottom of it but gave us the go-ahead to look at other properties so we could have a back up plan just in case it went wrong. The next day, he found out the seller had decided to sell to a private buyer for more money instead. Needless to say we were really disappointed as well as being annoyed at being messed around. The agent is furious too. And we are all anxious because despite what everyone says about it being such a buyers' market, there is nothing out there right now. All the one beds in this area have been sold in the last month or so. Crazy!

So it's a case of waiting and hoping for something else to come up. But wait, if you are angry with the seller for us, there's more. We popped into another of the estate agents for the area yesterday to re-register with them. On explaining our situation, they were really helpful and although they didn't have anything suitable right now they would let us know if something new came up. Then he asked where we were buying before and when we said the name of the street he immediately asked if it was Mr P's flat. After that followed a long conversation with some history on the flat and the seller. It transpires that this guy had been selling the same flat through this agent many months ago and turned down much higher offers than the price we had agreed, and had also let someone else down in the same way. They weren't dealing with him anymore and didn't have much nice to say about him. The agent even pulled out a log book and showed us the written entries. We were stunned, we had not expected to hear this at all and it's left us a bit baffled. What on earth could this guy be gaining from this? Was he trying to get us to up our offer? It's all very bizarre.

So anyway, we are registered with the 2 most prominent agents in the area (and I'll be signing up with a couple more this week) who are making us something of a priority given the situation and knowing we are serious buyers who are ready to roll for a quick sale. We can only hope something right comes along. Cross your fingers for us.

*sigh*