This article, despite the headline, is more about me, than estate agents. Because I am currently a quivering mess of emotions. That is not the fault of the estate agents. It is because I am selling the house in which I have lived for the past twenty-one years. But, if you read on to the end, you will find that it does connect back to estate agents eventually.
In early 1976 I bought this house in something of a hurry. In the closing months of 1975 Janet and I had been spending much of our spare time, looking for a bigger house in the Gospel Oak neighbourhood, because our existing house in Oak Village was just not big enough to house our growing children and put up our foreign friends and our extended families. We had found a house twice as big over the road, at substantially less than the value of our house, but which needed a lot doing to it.
There was a snag. It had a sitting tenant. But because we had been looking for some time, and were well-acquainted with the lady, we knew that she was on the verge of getting a council flat. So we put in our offer, which was about £18,000. And the deal was proceeding.
Then, on Friday, the thirteenth of September, (I mention the date in case any of my readers are superstitious. I am, of course, a rational human being.) I was knocked off my motor bike in Pall Mall, on the way back to The Economist, for whom I was then working.
In February, the Abbey National told me that they would not give me a mortgage on our preferred house. In those days, the building societies, were unprepared to lend on a house, which had an elderly tenant with legal rights inhabiting a bedsit on the first floor. Though we were quite happy to live with her, while she waited for the Council to give her, what she had wished for many years, a nice small mod cons council flat. Because, on our visits, we had become quite fond of her.
But I was starting a new job, and facing a prospect of several months on crutches, during which I would be incapable of doing any of my amateur do-it-yourself. So we opted to buy a similar house in the same street for around £25,500, which was we could easily live in without doing anything immediately, because it had been well-maintained and modernised, but in 1950s, rather than Victorian style.
Most of the work we did, and the money we spent, on that house was ripping out the plaster board partitions, and installing replicas of two of the original fireplaces. So what we now have is something which combines the elegance of the Victorian structure, with central heating, discreet big French windows facing the garden, etc, etc.
But even before we had done anything, I remember sitting at my desk, then in the front ground floor ‘dining room’ which was designated my study, the first study I had ever had in my life, and feeling totally happy. This was a house in which I was quite happy to spend the rest of my life
But I have lived longer than I expected to. And I am now looking forward to a change, when I will divide my time between a flat near here and a small house by the seaside.
And so is all my family. But we are all in a mess of emotions, because so much of our life together has been lived in this heap of bricks and mortar which has suited us. So today while were discussing all the practicalities of this change, little Dulcie upset a glass of wine over the documents I had brought over to show to Holly. And slightly bigger Joe had vanished to the sitting room to play on his parent’s laptop.
Earlier in the day my wife had erupted, because, due to a misunderstanding, I had arranged for the first visits of the first prospective buyers at the wrong time. So she vanished and I dealt with them, carefully concealing the tears in my eyes.
We were fearing the newly rich who were going to tear out what we had so carefully constructed. But in fact, it was not so bad. Two of the three lots who came round were obviously appreciative of what we had done. And although, one was a rising grocer and the other a banker, they both were not just buying their houses as ‘investments’.
They were not behaving like ‘estate agents’. But, neither were most of the estate agents I have been dealing with. They have mostly shown quite a lot of sensitivity to the emotional upheavals that are an intricate part of selling and buying houses. (Though, they are, I think, overpaid in relation to postmen, milkmen and small shopkeepers, who also spend a lot of their time dealing with the emotional needs of the people they encounter while earning their daily bread.)
My headline was provoked by the comment of Phil on the previous blog I wrote in which I referred to the estate agents who were dominating my life. He wrote that those I had encountered must have been young. Because even estate agents die of shame. Good joke.
But that rather misses the point I was making. Which will be clear to anyone who has read my last three blogs. Estate agents and small shopkeepers are doing just exactly what they have been doing for generations.
What is different today is that university teachers are being encouraged to behave like estate agents, and university vice chancellors are going along with it. The students are not our customers. Our job is not to sell them the knowledge and experience we have. It is to challenge and provoke them. It is to make them dissatisfied.
Our job is not to quench their thirst. It is to whet their appetites, to raise their aspirations, not to train them to fit in with the fashions of the times.