Country
Looking for a country house can seem like fun: contact a friendly estate agent and then spend a nice weekend or two looking round beautiful houses and choose between three or four gems.
The reality is rather different. The house that looks perfect in Country Life was sold a month before. The bubbling trout stream behind the pretty farm house fails to cover the sound of the motorway. The view from the house is not improved by pylons. What starts as a pleasure can change quickly to being a frustrating chore that takes months, if not years. The reality is that there are only a handful of good houses that come onto the market every year.
And when you have found the one you love, your problems are just starting. Country negotiations are unsettling even for those experienced in buying property in the UK. Asking prices are often replaced by guide prices. Semantics? Not when you have made a bid at what you thought was the asking price but find that there are three bids above you and that ‘best and final' offers are being asked for that evening.
This is familiar stuff to us. It should be. We have been working solely on behalf of the buyer for twenty-five years and all our executives live and work in the areas that they cover. These local roots and our focus on the buyer are so important because the early information on houses coming up is vital and we get to hear things that others don’t.
But as you can gather from the example above, knowledge is only half the answer. Skill in negotiation is what delivers the house that you want - and that is where the team effort and combined experience are so important. We have worked for many of the top business people of the past quarter century and managed to impress them enough that they are our primary sales force. Our record and reputation, we hope, speaks for itself.