I’ve been looking into buying a place here in London recently, with the prices falling and the interest rates making saving practically pointless and all, it seems like a good time.  So I’ve been doing some searching on the various property websites out there, found a few that look ok, nice enough areas, within budget and so on.  One in particular I clicked on the ‘contact estate agent’ tab, filled in my details and checked to arrange a viewing.

I had left both email and mobile number so figured that the agent would then be in touch to arrange a time.  A few days passed and no sign of the estate agents.  It got towards a week of silence so I decided to call them up.  Got through to a girl at their office and she wasn’t aware of any web based contact (groan), but she’d get an agent to call me to fix something up.  A few more days of silence so I called again, same thing, but at least this time someone called back within the hour and we arranged a viewing.

We’re in a seriously depressed market right now, if the media are to be believed there aren’t many buyers out there so I’d have guessed estate agents would be falling over themselves to ‘service’ potential buyers like myself, so the difficulty I had getting a viewing was not a good sign, but alas I had one, so that was something.

Unfortunately a booked viewing was not the same as an actual viewing.  Yesterday was the day of this much anticipated viewing, so I cycled down to the place in plenty of time and got there a comfortable 10/15 minutes ahead of time.  It wasn’t the nicest of days to be hanging about but patiently I did so.  2 o’clock came and went with no sign of anyone from the estate agent.  At quarter past I rung them up to see what was going on.  They had no record of the viewing but would get one of the sales staff to call me to sort things out.

Some twenty minutes passed and still nothing, so I called for a second time, and this time the girl on the phone promised that she would come out herself, give her 10 minutes and she’ll be there.  I waited at the property until 10 to 3, around half an hour after this phone call, before deciding to call it quits and give up on this property.

It turned out that the pictures on the website had glossed over certain things that put me off the property in question, but even if they hadn’t, the antics of the estate agents certainly would have done.

Step forward Haart Estate Agents, you were absolutely bloody awful.