Taking the Housing Trip – Finally

We finally got the Visa thing squared away and were finally able to take our housing trip.  The trip was for 4 days in London.  In that time, we were supposed to find a home for us to rent, find our temporary housing and identify a school for our son.  Again, we had the expertise of our relocation company on which to rely.  That is where this part of the story begins…

 

Finding our House

Carrie had already taken a trip to London a few weeks prior and found a great town just outside of London called Richmond.  It is a nice family-oriented spot with shopping, nice restaurants and is on the tube.  With that narrowed down, we just needed to find a place to live.  So we told our representative, we’ll call her Claire, to look there for us.

I’m at a bit of a loss on how to describe Claire, but I’ll give it a go.  Have you ever met someone that thinks they know what’s best for you, regardless of your opinion?  Add to that: 2 parts used car salesman and 3 parts rude French waiter.  Cover it with gray hair, throw on some lipstick, put it in the oven for 30 minutes and you have Claire.

Now, there is something about me that you may not know.  I sold copiers for a year when I was just out of college (I was young; I needed the money).  When you take a job hocking boxes they teach you each and every sales tactic.:  things like the assumptive close, many little yeses lead to a big yes, etc.  Keep that in mind while we describe our encounter with Claire.

 

Meeting Claire

We were pretty excited when we went to meet Claire.  I mean, how many times in your life do you get to find a new home?  So it was with that excitement that we sat down with her for the first time.  Claire began the conversation letting us know that we were a bit late (we were) and we needed to hurry.  This just after she got my wife a coffee. 

Next, she let us know that this was the worst time of year to try to rent a house and that most of the good ones were gone.  In fact there were 2 houses that were “perfect for us” that just rented out last week.  That royally pissed us off because they would have been available to us had our Visas been done on time and we been able to make our original housing trip.

Claire then let us know that she lined up 12 or so houses for us to see.  She relayed that she set up the appointments in order of importance.  In her opinion, we should probably rent the first house as it was best suited for us.  However, in the unlikely event that she was wrong, she had 5 other adequate places for us to see thereafter on day one.  The houses on day 2 were pure rubbish (this is because there is nothing available and had nothing to do with her searches btw).  With that in mind, Claire was kind enough to let us know that, given all of these factors, it was in our best interest to make an offer by the end of day one.  If not, it was likely someone else would make an offer on those properties in short order.

After hearing this, I had some mild, if not severe, flashbacks to copier sales school.  Claire had employed every tactic I learned on day 1.  She had set expectations, as well as established a high degree of urgency.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had whipped out a Lanier 6242 (42 copy per minute system I used to sell back in the day), showed me a demo and presented me with a contract.  That was how our day started.

 

Claire’s Top Picks

I do have to say that the first 2 were fine houses she showed us were fine places (we actually rented the 1st, but we’ll get back to that later).  The positives were that they both met our requirement of 4 bedrooms (one for us, Jack, an office and guest room) and were close to the tube (the underground train station).  They also had a bonus in that they each had a garage and driveway with a parking spot (neither very common in the London area). 

The negatives were that both had small reception rooms (we call them family rooms in the US), no fireplaces, small bedrooms and tiny showers.  I don’t have the actual square footage, but I would guess around 1000.  Now, we knew to expect much smaller houses in the London area.  However, these places cost a premium (approximately twice what we could rent our 2800 square foot house in Phoenix for) and for all of that none of our furniture would fit.  Forgetting the cost of buying all new furniture, the showers are small enough that I’m not sure I’ll be able to reach up to clean my arm pits – so don’t sit next to me on the train until it can be confirmed.

We gave Claire all of this feedback and we continued the search.  We then saw the next 5 or so houses scheduled for that day, but none of them were all that great.  We were starting to get concerned because Claire had already warned us that the houses for day 2 stunk, but that was a problem for day 2.  It was only noon and we had a half day of looking at nursery schools ahead of us.  I’ll detail that tomorrow…