Kate Solomon

Before you buy a house, you will hear old wives’ tales and made up statistics about how it’s the most stressful thing you can do in life.

Pah, you may say. I buy stuff all the time. Hell, I even bought a car/three-seat sofa/plasma TV/holiday and that cost multiple thousands of pounds. No way can buying a house be more stressful than that.

Soon you’ll realise that you were wrong.

First, the hunt. You find a house you like the look of online and visit it. It is either a poky little hovel that has been Photoshopped into looking like a halfway acceptable home, or it’s the most perfect thing you ever saw in your life and you’ll feel that without owning this house you will be unable to enjoy even a millisecond of the remaining years of your life.

Meanwhile, the credit check. The days of nail biting anxiety as you await the mortgage agreement in principle, wondering if the bank is judging you unable to afford a mortgage because you put a £3 cinnamon and raisin bagel on your credit card on Tuesday and haven’t paid it off yet.

Then, the offer. You look at the asking price, realise you’ve been completely over-optimistic in your budget and should never truly have viewed the house at all. You take a punt and put in an offer of exactly half. You’ll justify this to yourself in a number of ways – none are valid. The offer is rejected. You offer a bit more; there’s a bit more rejection. You offer again but the vendor has accepted another offer.

Heartbreak. You mourn. You go through the seven stages of grief, spending more than is socially acceptable on ‘anger’. You say ‘que sera sera’ a lot.

You return to Rightmove. You find a house you like the look of. You go through it all again two or three more times, with two or three further floorplans made to scale in Illustrator, with scale models of your furniture variously arranged throughout your hypothetical home. You come up with decorating schemes. You ponder which walls you could knock through. You consider loft conversions, installing a food disposal unit, opening up the chimney for an open fire.

Finally, just when you feel there isn’t a single house on the market that suits you, you come across a wildcard. Panic sets in. If you don’t get this house, you’ll never get any house. If you don’t make an offer now, someone else will get this one. If you don’t get the chance to two rooms into one in the next six months, you’ll explode.

You make an offer.

You wait.

You dial the estate agent’s number for an update and hang up before they answer. Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen.

At last, success! Your offer is accepted. There’s champagne and interior design magazines. You are overflowing with good will.

You feel like you’ve won the war, but it’s only half time in the first battle. Next comes the actual mortgage application. The repeated requests for the estate agent to take the house off the market. The constant fear of gazumping. The shock of how much solicitors charge. The suspense of the survey. The inability of anyone to give you a straight answer.

That’s where we are. There has to be a better way.