Buying a house in this country has something of Leo Tolstoy’s famous opening line in Anna Karenina about it: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Ask people about their experience of homebuying and, though the responses you’ll get will be uniformly negative, each one will be specific to that individual – uniquely awful in its own way.
For my part, within six months I had offers on three consecutive properties get accepted and fall through. Although the fourth one stuck, by the time I held those hallowed front door keys in my hand, it was nigh on eight months after I’d first agreed to buy the damn thing. It should have been an “easy” sale – I was a first-time buyer purchasing from a literal dead woman, the definition of chain-free – but this somehow did nothing to speed up the endless path to home ownership.
