Name: Homebuyer sleepovers.
Age: Newish.
Appearance: Imagine liking an Airbnb so much that you decide to live there.
I’d love to do that, if only to see what is kept in the obligatory Locked Cupboard of Mystery. Well, great. Start looking around on Zoopla and see how it goes.
Really? Sure. According to the Wall Street Journal, more and more people are refusing to buy a house until they’ve spent a full night there.
In a house they don’t own? Correct.
Because they want to see if it’s haunted? Well, it’s usually because they want to see if the house will suit their needs, but sure, people may also want to stay over in a prospective new home to make sure it isn’t riddled with ghosts.
And the current homeowners are OK with this? More often than not, yes. Selling a home can be gruelling, so why not speed it up by letting some strangers spend the night?
I don’t know, it sounds quite subversive to me. Does it? Or does the current way of buying a house make absolutely no sense?
What do you mean? Last year it was reported that a fifth of buyers make an offer after looking at a place for less than 20 minutes. The biggest purchase of their lives, and they don’t have enough time to check if the walls are too thin or the water pressure sucks or the neighbours perform noisy satanic rituals in their garden every night.
Come to mention it, my neighbours do perform a lot of rituals. See? And you would have known that if you had slept at the house for the night.
I suppose houses are quite expensive. Quite? In the UK, the average home currently costs 7.9 times the median annual earnings of a full-time employee, up from 3.6 times in the 1990s. And renting is just as bad. People spend an average of 36.3% of their earnings on rent, up from just 8% in the 1960s. So if you’re buying a house, it’s best to be absolutely certain.
And staying over is free? That depends. Quite often the terms have to be worked out by lawyers in advance. Some homeowners allow a night if the potential buyers bring their own mattresses. Others will clear out entirely and let the buyers rent the place at market value for a couple of months before they make a decision.
You would definitely know if the place was haunted after two months. Why are you so obsessed with ghosts?
Have you tried searching Rightmove for the term “definitely not haunted”? It’s next to useless. That does seem to be the determining factor for the housing crisis, you’re right.
Do say: “Thinking of buying a home? Sleep over.”
Don’t say: “Drive down living costs by looking at 365 houses a year.”
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