One of the joys of spring is my annual nose around other people’s houses. Or it used to be. It seems things have changed in the house-hunting world. Estate agency has become automated.
I had spotted a nice three-bedroomed place near Tooting Common and had rung the agent to ask them to show me round.
‘Are you registered with us?’ said the perky voice at the other end, sounding suspiciously like a call centre operative. There then followed an inquisition I can only liken to getting through security at Tel Aviv airport when you’ve got a stamp on your passport from Iran.
It started with the utterly baffling question: ‘Why are you looking to move house?’ Why? I can get my head round an estate agent asking me the what, how and when of my house-moving ambitions. But why? ‘Why do you need to know why?’ I asked, feeling the Kafkaesque red mist descending. ‘Because it’s part of the registration process,’ she said. Clever, clever. These people never diversify from the circular logic of their crib sheet, which is indestructible.
Of course, I didn’t want to tell the disembodied voice of a person known to me for 30 seconds the story of last year’s abortive attempt at getting hitched to the world’s most unpromising candidate for a husband and now finding myself alone and wondering whether I ought to invest in a larger property anyway. But you can’t argue with someone filling in a form, so I had to tell her.
‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ I went on, warming to the honesty of my theme. ‘And then I saw that house and I thought, I’d quite like to buy that because it’s got a big pile of logs in the breakfast-room hearth.’
‘Right,’ she said, ‘and is your flat currently on the market?’ ‘Nope,’ I said, positively emboldened by the joy of honesty now. ‘I’m probably the worst potential buyer you have for this property because I’ve not even thought about putting my own property on the market. I would be a nightmare to deal with because I don’t have the finance in place and it would probably take ages to arrange the sale of my flat, which is in the middle of a lease extension. And then there’d be a chain, and the fact that I’m naturally indecisive and make a drama out of everything, which will hold things up further. In fact, I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to show me round. Waste of time, in all likelihood.’
‘Well,’ she said, undeterred from her primary purpose, ‘I just need to take some more details.’ Ravenously, she swallowed up my name, address, three telephone numbers and then demanded an email so they could send me updates on other properties. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not give you my email. I just want to look at this house and if I like it I might buy it and if I don’t I won’t.’
‘But we have to take an email,’ she said. ‘It’s part of the registration…’ ‘…process, yes, I know.’ We argued back and forth for a bit and then, sounding exasperated, she blurted out emotively, ‘It’s because of Suzy Lamplugh!’
This floored me. For a second I nearly gave in. Then I thought, hang on a minute. ‘But you’ve got my name, address and phone numbers. What’s an email going to prove?’
‘It’s for our security,’ she said in grave, outraged tones, before adding, ‘I remember it like it was yesterday. We all remember it.’ Oh, dear. If I wasn’t careful this phone call was going to end in me being written up as a person of insufficient ability to be moved by a tragedy. So I said, ‘I’m really sorry about the difficulties faced by the estate agent community. Perhaps I could just narrow down the issues outstanding to the following proposition: can I look round this house without giving you an email?’ ‘No.’ So I gave her my email and we made an appointment for me to view the property and I put the phone down.
A few minutes later, the first message arrived. ‘Dear Kite,’ it said, rather impertinently. ‘In order to comply with the latest directives from the EC on privacy and electronic communications we are sending you this email on an automatic basis.’
In other words: ‘Here’s some junk mail that could contravene some junk regulations prohibiting junk mail that doesn’t announce that it’s junk mail.’
Ten minutes later my email box was swimming in unsolicited messages, including ones from other estate agents who were also now warning me that unless they warned me they were sending me junk mail they would be contravening EC regulations.
And they tell me I’m a nuisance.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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