When I say I’m addicted to property porn, I don’t use the expression lightly. Like many users of the less sexy kind (you know, the boring sort with naked bodies in it), I gaze upon the pictures and imagine it’s actually me there, doing it. Living in a Georgian rectory down a country lane in Dorset, stirring stew in my comfy old kitchen, all authentic sash windows and lime plaster intact. Or hosting literary gatherings at my minimalist penthouse in Clerkenwell, having eschewed all children, pets and red wine stains from my newly rectilinear life.
Other days, I just kick back in my beach house in Malibu, having already, in this particular fantasy, made enough Hollywood money to enjoy the view with a green juice perched on my surf board. (And to replace the naff glass balcony with a classier wooden alternative, after going on Google Street View and having a good look at how all the neighbours have done theirs.)
During hour after hour spent on online property portals such as Rightmove, Zoopla and Zillow, I do not just become the person who owns the property. I become the sort of person who owns property like that. The fact that I don’t like green juice, never make stew and can’t surf are not irrelevant to the point: sometimes I think they are the point. The houses hold the key to a different life.
Tragically, a lot of British estate agents are now asking potential buyers to prove they are “proceedable” before granting so much as a viewing. This means showing them what you have on the market yourself, your bank statements or your new mortgage preapproval documents. As well as being a crime against grammar, this whole “proceedable” business is a crime against my favourite hobby, as I’ve been given my weekends back. (I didn’t want them back, so thanks for nothing.)
Being unproceedable has even changed my holidays — I’d previously think nothing of booking in a quick viewing during a few days off in Somerset, or Suffolk, or Edinburgh. My daughter is delighted, as she now doesn’t have to spend half-terms traipsing around yet another barn conversion, my hand over her mouth while she tries to wail, “Mummy I’m so bored of looking at houses you do this EVERY TIME WE GO ANYWHERE.”
I used to work in Los Angeles and still visit regularly, pretending it’s about catching up with old friends and professional contacts. Really, it’s about cramming as many open houses as I can into one weekend, given that property tastemakers such as TakeSunset.com are kind enough to let anyone have a nosy around what they’re selling.
Even if a house isn’t doing public viewings, I often book a private one with LA realtors, hearing myself coming up with some story about how my husband is just waiting for his visa to be approved and we’re getting to know the market. Reader, I don’t have a husband, but realtors certainly seem to love hearing about them, so off I go.
So imagine my dismay, a couple of years ago, when I viewed a very cool house for sale in Echo Park, a once-rustic area that has become a hipster enclave on the east side of the city. The decor was all dreamily Californian, with a white piano in the living room and a hammock in the hippyish garden outside. Framed photos of beautiful people splashing in the ocean hung beside macramé crafts on the walls. Yes, I thought at every turn, I want the life these people lead here.
As I told the realtor all about my family plans to move back to LA any minute now, cough cough, she became quite chatty in return, revealing to me that the owners had in fact moved out and these arty possessions were not theirs. I was confused. She explained that the house had been “staged” by a company that earned good money making houses look as if cool people lived there. So you might, if you paid close enough attention, have seen the exact same furniture and art on a totally different house viewing elsewhere. The staging company lugged it around town in a van.
This agent went on to explain that the owners were actually an older couple who were now living in the basement flat, with most of their furnishings in storage. When I asked to see that flat too, I couldn’t understand her reluctance. Until I got in there and the first thing I noticed was a coat rack full of an entirely different style of clothes, with a Make America Great Again cap hanging prominently by the door. These vendors were ageing Trump supporters, hidden from view of the demographic of young Democrat-voting buyers. I was gobsmacked. How dare they try to sell me a lie!
Yes, the irony did escape me at the time, though I have come to ponder on it since. Why do I want to sell them a lie and pretend I could buy a house I couldn’t? Why would one person waste their life imagining all of these other ones?
I should add: my own home life is not bad. We’re in a nice part of London; we have a garden; there are original Victorian shutters on the windows and colourful paintings on the walls. Having moved house more than once with my daughter, she has just started at secondary school so we certainly won’t be moving again any time soon. Yet this compulsion has proved more addictive to me than smoking ever was.
I recently started seeing a psychoanalyst. I told him about this property obsession and I said that while I knew it sounded foolish, perhaps it would actually be cured if I could buy five beautiful houses. Five, I thought, might truly be enough. Except then I’d have to rent them out and I’d end up becoming an evil landlord.
“How about we change that to property mogul,” he laughed, suggesting there was nothing inherently wrong with my desire to own a lot of property. Excellent, I thought, this is what I pay you for. Encouraged, I then went on to admit to him that the time I was spending on Rightmove had sometimes reached 10 hours a day. He did not have as immediate an answer for that.
Still, at least a life spent judging photos of other people’s houses has taught me a lot about what works and what doesn’t. I see the ones that sell quickly; I see the ones that linger for months. And I have come to understand that if you’re listing your house for sale, what you are selling is a dream as much as a structure.
What doesn’t work, in the building of that dream, is clutter, or even up to 50 per cent of your furniture. People absolutely want to believe that they will become the beautifully tidy person they are imagining from your photographs, so I’d get almost everything off the kitchen worktops first.
Estate agents tend to use wide-angle photography to show most of a room in a single shot, and while this is useful for listing purposes, it can have the unfortunate effect of making furniture look as if it’s crowded together. So if your living room has a sofa, a side table and two chairs all somewhere near the back wall, they’re probably going to look like a traffic pile-up. Quite honestly, I would move the chairs into the garden until the photographer has left.
Similarly, a double bed shoved against a wall can look too poky in a pic, so if you can move it into the middle of the room and make things look symmetrical, I would. You want to give the illusion of your home being filled with space, for space is a valuable commodity. Then there is virtual staging, where CGI images can fill a blank room with slick-looking new furnishings. If you look closely you can always tell it’s fake and a bit ghoulish, but still much easier than hiring that van.
It’s not just me — many people I speak to admit they can’t get enough of Rightmove either. I think it’s fair to say that looking at property listings online has become something of a national obsession. Rightmove says that 80 per cent of all time spent on property portals in the UK is on its site, though it doesn’t specify what fraction of its users are delusional.
Its busiest time, apparently, is a Wednesday evening at 8:48pm, and, oh, I can just imagine the scene. It’s that lull in the middle of the evening, in the middle of the week, when we all start glancing around at our lives and wondering if there might be something better out there than this. (If there was some way of linking Rightmove to the dating apps, they’d have the whole fantasy lifestyle market stitched up.)
If, like me, you still want more, there’s also Inigo for ogling period properties, and its sister agency The Modern House for more updated design. Waterside Residential is for riverside or island houses or houseboats, while I like Belles Demeures for châteaux in France. Idealista is a big portal for Spain, Portugal and Italy, while Zoopla is probably the best if you want to nosy at what your friend paid for their house in the UK.
Google the address equivalent of “house prices in Downing Street, London SW1A” and several years’ worth of sales should come up, though not all do. Sometimes you can look through the photos from previous listings too. Or pay £3 to the government’s land registry website to see whose name is on the deeds and whether the property is mortgaged and — I think I’ve said too much.
(An investigative journalist colleague once looked on with awe as I spotted a celebrity outside their house on the news and, within moments, had worked out which street they lived on and what they had paid for it. He said I should work for an open-source intelligence agency like Bellingcat, but I’m not sure I’d get the same thrill from locating bombing hide-outs as I do from fantasy real estate.)
Still, perhaps you are reading this in utter despair, as the long-suffering spouse of someone who can’t walk past an estate agent without stopping to look at every house in the window. Perhaps you are driven mad by your partner suggesting a different town to relocate to every single week. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m with them — you really should think long and hard about how you could easily afford eight bedrooms, a swimming pool and a llama farm if you’d simply move to a field beside the ring road outside Carlisle.
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