How To Not Buy A House

Anyone can avoid buying a house. Simply by not doing any of the things that lead to a successful property transaction, starting with looking for a house to buy in the first place, almost everyone in the world doesn’t buy houses every day. Not buying houses, at its most basic, is an easy thing, regularly accomplished by everyone from new born infants to newly dead corpses. There are, however, a few individuals in this world who have elevated this easily mastered non-skill to the level of an art-form, even to the exalted heights of a science, and it is their methods that I will detail here for anyone who might want to investigate the process of really, definitively not buying a house, in the most spectacular style possible, whilst annoying the hell out of everyone involved, and doing yourself and others out of thousands of pounds and months of precious life.

The basic rules for not buying a house, once you have selected the house that you aren’t going to purchase, are as follows:

1. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, arrange sufficient finance to pay for the property in question.

This key point is frequently overlooked by amateurs seeking to rise up to the ranks of truly flaky buyers, so it cannot be overstated: if you have the money, your chances of completing a transaction rise above zero. This is an extremely dangerous position for a would-be non-purchaser. Relying on other factors to prevent a successful sale is clearly foolish when, by the simple expedient of not actually having the cash, you can ensure the total failure of the exercise from the start.

Of course, dedicated aficionados of not buying houses will build on this basic foundation to create a complex, exhausting and time-consuming web of mayhem for the prospective sellers, the various agents and solicitors, architects, engineers, builders, other sub-contrators, and a few random passersby. The first measure that should be taken to ensure the catastrophic collapse of the transaction is to earn the trust of the sellers. Your aim is to convince them that you do, despite all outward appearances, have the money. This can be done by various means, which in combination will dupe even the most cynical of individuals. Repeatedly visiting the property with your children in tow, and getting them to appear attached to the place is a good opening gambit. Bringing an assortment of tradesmen, architects and engineers to look round and measure up for extensive conversion adds an unbeatable air of authenticity to proceedings, although it is rather expensive, and you should not stint on this part of the process. Leading the sellers to believe that you are professional property developers, and therefore somehow able to finance the purchase by means not normally available to mortals will help. And naming approximate dates for completion will, with any luck, convince your prospective vendors to accept your offer.

Once the sellers have been persuaded to remove the property from the market you can sit back and do nothing for a few months. You may wish to send a few personal letters, bypassing the more usual means of communication via lawyers and agents, to reassure that you are still alive and intending to complete at some unspecified point in the future. Feel free to write these letters in purple or green ink, it will add conviction.

After some time, your sellers may begin to suspect that there is a problem and might seek to put their house back on the market. The best thing to do in this case is to delude yourself that they aren’t serious, and to continue as before until they actually get another offer, at which juncture you should act surprised and hurt that they would do something as mean as seeking to sell their house to someone else just because this usurper might possibly be able to complete in under four months. Fortunately, you will probably find that the competing offer isn’t as quite as good as yours, and if you manage to convince your own lawyer that you now really do have the money to complete on the sale, you will be able to continue as before. This last step may be tricky unless you make sure that you appoint an incompetent solicitor to handle your affairs, otherwise you may not be able to get away with this deception.

With disaster averted you can return to your default tactic of delaying by getting your well trained idiot lawyers to request as much unnecessary detail regarding the property as possible. Ensure that they ask numerous questions about the drains. Request superceded deeds from two centuries back, especially if they aren’t held by the homeowner or their mortgage company, but by the organisation that sold the house twenty-odd years ago. This will buy you weeks of time in which to do absolutely nothing whatsoever of practical use, like, say, getting some money together. Eventually, however, despite your best efforts, you will run out of procrastination opportunities, and you will finally be asked by your solicitor to sign the contract of sale. Don’t do this. It will cost you rather a lot of money, and you haven’t got any, remember? Instead, you can delay for a few more days, until it’s close enough to Christmas to prevent your sellers from being able to re-market for a month or so. Then you can deliver your final, spectacular coup-de-gracé, the move that will ensure your elevation to the very highest ranks of the non-house-buyers, and prove that you are flakier than a big box of Cadbury’s Flakes after an accident with an industrial flaking machine. In a cornflake factory. Owned by Jeff Flake.

Here’s what you do: you send another letter direct to your sellers, once again bypassing the usual channels, explaining that you are short of more than sixty grand, and ask them to lend you the money. That’s right, ask them to spot you the cash to buy their own house off them. Offer to secure the shortfall in funds on their own house, via a charge which will take second place to any interest your mortgage company has in the property, and is therefore pretty much worthless if anything goes wrong. If you are lucky, given favourable weather conditions, you should be able to hear their hollow, hysterical laughter from the next county.

Congratulations! You have failed utterly to buy a house, and you have wasted thousands of pounds of your own on architects, engineers, lawyers and sundry other expenses, as well as stacks of the vendors’ money, and eight (8) months of their time on a falling housing market, during which someone else less infuriatingly rubbish than yourself would almost certainly have succeeded in completing both sale and conversion. Well done! I sincerely hope something horrible involving weasels happens to your entire family, and that you catch a selection of unpleasant skin diseases, you useless bastards.

This guide applies only to English & Welsh legislation, and will probably not work in any jurisdiction where the property transaction laws are even slightly sane. Any resemblance to events that may have transpired recently, and real persons living or dead is entirely intentional and is a direct result of said persons’ stupidity.

7 comments 2008-01-09 19:04 Categories: Personal, Rage