I knew you before the West was won.
And I heard you say,
“The past was much more fun.”
You go your way, I go mine –
But I’ll see you next time.

It’s all been done,
It’s all been done.
It’s all been done before!

Two conversations of interest this afternoon in the the ever-complicating saga of the house, though this time it’s sheer incredulity that I’m left with, rather than anything else.

The first conversation was a call from my mortgage broker. He’s sent all the paperwork off to the lender and he’ll chase them if he’s not heard anything by the end of the week. Nice, efficient, pleasant, and I trust him. He’s earning less commission than he would have if we’d gone with the original plans, but still perfectly pro-active and helpful. He wasn’t kidding when he said he was after our remortgage business in a couple of years’ time.

The second conversation? The estate agent, phoning to tell me that our vendors have found somewhere to live. First thought – wow, that was fast. They only started looking last week! There was more though. The vendors have arranged their mortgage through the estate agent. Would I care to do so? No. Not even if they can guarantee to beat the rate I’ve been quoted elsewhere? No. Not even if they can give me a fixed rate of 3.2 %? Not a chance, matey. I don’t believe for a second I can get that rate. Even if I hadn’t already paid for the valuation survey, I’d be going elsewhere for my mortgage. Somewhere where they’re up front about how much they earn from my business.

All this, too, after they’d already spoken to my mortgage broker! So far all I’ve got from the buying process is a list of who not to sell through when we come to sell, however many years down the line it is. I think I’ve met at best one even remotely trustworthy bloke so far, and that was because he was a sole trader in a sea of national franchises.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.