Moving Tales – A couple of stories from our homefinders

A landlord reports that there have been several consecutive tenants during the tenancy. On one inspection of his property, the landlord was shocked to find a pole had been attached to the ceiling in the centre of the sitting room for the purposes of lewd dancing. No enquiries had been made to request this erection, or even raise the issue of change of use.

My task for the day was to view four houses. I viewed the first three without incident and set my Tom Tom to the postcode which was printed on the details of the fourth house.

I carefully followed the directions and found myself going into the depths of beyond down high banked single track lanes with grass growing down the centre and no signs of habitation.  Suddenly my Tom Tom announced I had reached my destination.  I climbed onto a bank to look around to see if there was a house secreted down a track somewhere but nothing…

I continued on for several miles and eventually came to a farm where I ran the gauntlet of the geese and found an old lady making cheese in the dairy.  I showed her the house details and enquired as to where the property was located.  She said she’d never heard of it and told me she had lived there for 77 years and it had never been there in her lifetime!  I asked whether the postcode was the same as the one for her farm (I have to admit I didn’t think she would know what a postcode was) but she confirmed that the post code was indeed the same as her own.  The mystery deepened.

Realising the post code on the details must be wrong, I returned to my car to ring the agents but of course no mobile signal and, from the lack of telephone wires running to it, it was obviously futile to ask the farmer whether I could use his phone as they didn’t have one.

Having driven back down the lanes for 5 or 6 miles, I eventually got a signal and called the agents to ask them for the correct postcode.  “It’s on the details”, they replied.  “The one on the details is wrong”, I responded and told them what had happened.  “Is it”?” they said – no apology.  “Oh yes, we have put it on the details with one digit wrong”.

The moral of this story is attention to detail saves a huge amount of time.  I eventually drove 12 miles back the way I had come before getting to the fourth property.