Words from Jonnie

WORLD

TV presenter and property expert Jonnie Irwin gives his thoughts and views on first time buyers and the housing market

Photo © Mike Prior I am one of life’s great procrastinators. It’s not something I’m proud of and it’s taken me a while to fully appreciate how annoying this is for those around me. It manifests itself through most of my social life and occasionally into my work life too. It all started at university. If there was any coursework to be written or revision to be done, the house would suddenly become the cleanest place on earth – which for a student house is pretty rare. I’d find any job to do other than the more cerebral task that was glaring me straight in the face or nagging at me in my subconscious.

As you might expect, I’ve thought about this a great deal – that’s kind of the issue, isn’t it? Finally, it dawned on me that if you put off making a decision for long enough, eventually the “non decision” represents the worst possible outcome.

After going online and looking at how to beat this pathetic impasse I often find myself i n, my wife suggested the idea of making a list. Now the list is something my wife has long been a fan of. She’s a ninja list maker and perennial achiever of all things! There’s an old phrase that goes something like “give a job to a busy person”. Well with three kids in nappies she’s certainly busy, but the stuff she can get done daily just blows my mind.

There’s something in the writing of a task that simplifies it and makes it more approachable, so when you get to put a line through it, well the feeling is more than relief. I’ve even been known to add things to a list that I know I’ve already completed just to make me feel like I’m really achieving! As you’re probably guessing, I’ve become quite evangelical about a list and how it helps me structure decision-making. Annoyingly so, a bit like an ex-smoker talking about how bad cigarettes are. I can see procrastination in people a mile off now that I’ve highlighted my own shortcomings and have recently been plagued by someone’s issues orbiting my life. Unfortunately, this someone was a pair of buyers of a property I was selling. Now, I get it – buying any house is a huge decision, but without a road map to help one make important decisions, buyers can get hamstrung and caught up in their own inertia. The archaic and hugely creaky system of buying a house in England and Wales is already painfully slow, so it often surprises me when buyers are happy to just let the process take its course and then add their own bad/non decisions to it. I’m not blessed with patience at the best of times and if I get a whiff that I’ve got a messer or a buyer who isn’t making a decision when they should, then I get nervous. In property, transaction momentum is everything and I’ve got too much experience of deals slowing down and then not happening. There is a natural timeline of a successful deal and if something goes on too long, it probably won’t happen. My buyers had promised the earth, keen to make the most out of the Stamp Duty holiday, had received all the searches and replies back but just weren’t pulling the trigger. Classic buyer vertigo - they needed a shove. As a seller, there’s little you can do other than offer them an ultimatum – but then you must go through with it. If they had done their research, they should’ve been confident that the property was correctly priced, which the valuation report backed up, but I suspected they wanted to know that someone else wanted my flat as much as they did, as they clearly weren’t confident with how they had arrived at the precipice of doing the deal. The issue in any property purchase is that you must pay more than anyone else to secure it. That’s just the way it is. If you’re not happy with how you’ve arrived at your decision or you’ve not researched your market, then you’ll end up kicking the can down the road and someone else will make the decision for you. My advice for any buyer who may be getting cold feet is to sit down and make a list. Pros on one side, cons the other and have a shortlist of alternatives with their pros and cons. I always encourage caution, but not at the cost of a fully informed decision. The latter is priceless. And what happened to my deal? I got another offer from a different buyer which prompted the previous buyers to pull their finger out. Silly pair…