Diary of a buyer: In for the long haul - 15 February 2008

Posted by Robert Southwell No comments

It looks as though we are going to have to be a lot more clever with our project of looking for property abroad after this weekend's exertions. Our first toe in the water of going to talk to estate agents about what we might want to buy was nearly our last, and only after a couple of hours of discussion have we decided to continue.

It all started during the week, when my wife came home with what seemed like a fantastic idea. Having seen an advertisement in the newspaper in the evening on her way home for a property exhibition, it seemed to be everything that we needed to start looking seriously for the property we will eventually retire to.

The exhibition was in a local hotel, and although it didn't promise information on every country that we might be interested in, we thought it would help us to get an idea of what is out there in the world of property abroad. As the first thing that we had done towards this newly-decided adventure, you can understand the excitement we both felt on heading to the hotel for the exhibition.

To say that we were disappointed is something of an understatement. Not only did we have to deal with the fact that the exhibition wasn't what we had believed it was going to be, but we also had to face rude and somewhat aggressive salespeople.

To explain: the exhibition that we thought would introduce us to some of the leading property agents and builders in the countries we have considered as places to live was, in fact, a marketing exercise for just one agent who happens to sell in all of those countries. This was obvious as soon as we got there, but as we had made the trip, we decided to stick around and at least see what they had to offer. This is where things began to go wrong.

We browsed the displays of property for all of 30 seconds before a salesman younger than our own son sidled up to us and asked what we were looking for. He was perfectly civil, and in explaining that we were just starting to look, he seemed to have a decent handle on each of the countries we mentioned. He kept suggesting that we should be considering buying more than one property, and that if we bought something as an investment we could be on the way to some kind of property investment empire.

I have no problems being straight with salespeople like this, and told him that we were certain we only wanted to buy a holiday home. It was at this point that he started to lose interest in us. The more we impressed upon him that we were only looking for the first time, that we didn't want to buy another three ski apartments in a country we would be hard-pushed to place on a map, and that we would by no means be putting down a deposit there and then, the more condescending he became.

The result of this was predictable. The salesman lost all interest in dealing with us, and became almost rude, so we got up and walked away disillusioned with the whole thing. The company now has my details as we had to fill in the registration to get in, and I have already had a call to follow up on the exhibition. My response was that the one thing we had decided from this weekend was which company we would not be buying our property abroad from.

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