Regular readers may have picked up on the plans we had to sell our house on the hill above Crouch End over looking the valley to Alexandra Palace. When we began thinking of it we had a mixture of motives. Mimi, my partner, has increasingly felt the need to spend more time in Chile to be close to her mother. Our son, Ben, the digital native, is making his own way in the world and will soon be moving out. So it looked like a good time to make a change. And the slightly scruffy, friendly, bohemian Crouch End we moved to nearly twenty years ago is changing. Still very pleasant. Still with real shops like butchers, bakers, fishmongers, a hardware store and so on. But changing.
The signs are on the kerbside. It used to be Citroen 2CVs, Renault 4s and slightly battered Volvo estates. Now it is BMWs, Saabs, a variety of 4x4s and a scattering of Porsches, Ferraris, Maseratis, with the occasional sighting of a Bentley.
So it seemed time to move on.
We first start thinking of making a move a the height of the property madness when people seemed to be shovelling suitcases of money at anything with a roof over it. We didn’t do it then because Mimi, my partner, was busily getting qualified as a Coach and Mentor and the stresses of selling a house seemed to much to take on as well.
When we eventually got round to it, even before we approach an estate agent, we had a very good offer from a private buyer. A nice family, the kind of people one would welcome to take over a place that had been a good home to us. Sadly, the day before they were due to exchange contracts on their home, their buyer dropped out. So far as I know they still haven’t sold.
After that we went to an estate agent, who found us an enthusiastic buyer. We also had found what could have been a small London base in an area we liked.
Plans seemed to be going well.
It looked as if we could sell our house and move in to our new base, all before we went on a trip to Chile for six weeks at the beginning of last December.
Then I began to feel a bit uneasy. Our buyer seemed to be dragging her feet. My unease was confirmed when I got a call from her asking if she could bring a friend to have a chat. It turned out that she had a younger brother who worked in financial services who had told her that she should ask for a ten per cent reduction. My estate agent said, “She’s having a laugh”. I politely declined her revised offer and as we were off to Chile in a few weeks took the house off the market.
When we got back from Chile we put the house back on the market, but the fizz had clearly gone and the collapse I had been anticipating for some time had clearly begun.
So what now?
Well there may be a dead cat bounce, that moment when confidence briefly returns to a market before it begins a much longer plunge. There are few tiny signals that this may take place. Some of the big boys are begin to buy some of what had been seen as the toxic bundles of mortgages in the belief that they may not be as toxic as most had feared. The Abbey and Barclays are busily building up market share in the retail mortgage market, which may prompt some of their rivals to move away from their current ultra risk adverse positions. The media may get bored with their sky is falling in headlines and move to a now is the time to buy line. Who knows, but if the cat does bounce and we get a reasonable offer, we may go ahead with something like our original plans.
And if the cat don’t bounce?
This is where things get very purposive drifty.
The idea of selling the house was that it was an easy way of buying some financial and geographic freedom. Now we will have to get a bit more inventive and attentive to get to that place. And, curiously, now we have have had a taste of summer and accepted that we are likely to stay on here a while, this looks like a pretty good place to stay. It has been a good base for nearly twenty years, so a few more years here means that we can continue to enjoy it and may even generate some new possibilities we hadn’t thought of.
You can then add into the equation the probability that from a pure investment point of view it almost certainly makes sense to hold on to our house for several more years. Even with quite a severe downturn (and this looks increasingly likely) the shifts I talked about at the beginning of this piece are changing the demographics and hence the values in this area. The kerbside doesn’t lie. So taking a five to ten year view, what we have now will be worth a lot more in real terms than it is now or even was a few months ago.
So here we are, back to purposive drift. The house is still on the market. We know we want to create a state of greater financial and geographic freedom. How this will come about is still the unknown. We may still sell the house, (Anyone looking for a nice place to live, with a good long term upside, and prepared to make a sensible offer can do so here) Some other way of achieving the state we would like may emerge from an unexpected and unpredictable place – it’s all a question of remaining open and sensitive to context, events and keeping the purposive in purposive drift.
And, who knows, the cat may bounce.