Azure butterflies and bluebell woodwork

Tuesday 7 April 2015

Sunny, warm and very warm later

22 degrees

Paint my nails with Chanel Azure, an iridescent bright butterfly blue/green mix and put on some leopard print.  I am a great believer in dressing for the client as it helps to bond with them and enables them to feel confident in working with me.  OH puts on something oatmeal coloured and subsequently far too thick for the wonderful hot Spring day which is to follow.  We are as odd looking a couple as you could hope to see on a Spring morning in a small town in the Pyrenees.

We meet the clients at their flat and have a brief run through of their thoughts about yesterday’s properties.  After a very low start, things developed beautifully and they are very interested in the property on the hill top they saw yesterday.  They are still concerned, however, that it is isolated.  During the day, they did pop up the hill and go and look at it.  Fortunately the owners were out.  Keen owners have put paid to more sales than you would ever have imagined possible.  They feel constrained to point out every last detail.  They become either transparently over-honest and reveal things which only serve to worry but are actually unimportant, or they wildly over-elaborate and the buyers, like scared virgins, run a mile.  There is an art to showing property.

We kick off at just the outskirts of town, in the mix of rural/urban which, it is becoming apparent, is their thing.  The house we see is a tall early 20^th century stone built town house, imposing with its stone framed windows painted a soft dove grey, fine mesh Juliette balconies and steep pitched slate roof.  The interior is modern and stylish with pebble floored shower rooms and huge bathtub.  Ikea paper lampshades explode from the ceilings like great dandelions.  The kitchen is sleek and shining with soft close cupboards and long work surfaces, ideal for preparing and delivering large and delicious dinners, dog legging down into the dining area with its Philip Starck effect ghost chairs.  The large terrace and lower garden are very well received.  OH breathes down my neck, cuts across me and keeps getting in the way, so I leave him to do the visit and hack and splutter behind them all.

We then go and see a renovation project and seem to be there a very long time, after which we are all very thirsty and go and sit in the shade outside of a bar and have coffee.  I talk through the buying process and they go back to their flat and we go for lunch.

OH stays at home to wait for the SFR repair man to come and reconnect us and I go back down town, meet the clients again and take them to a house in a nearby town, last visited when I was feeling ghastly just a couple of days ago.  They love this house even more.  I arrange to meet them again on Thursday and go back into town and see a house with a partner agent.  The house is not up to the specifications these clients are looking for but it is very interesting.  Belonging to Finnish and a holiday home, there is a large sunny sauna and shower room which takes up most of the lower ground floor, and leads onto two bedrooms.  The tall wood lined living room with its wrap around balcony is on the first floor.  Light floods in through the tall French windows.  The kitchen has white wooden units beautifully painted with bluebells and ivy and the wallpaper is a fine pink and white pinstripe design.  Two more bedrooms on the first floor.  Garden disappointingly small otherwise it is an absolutely lovely house and one I could see myself living in.

Back home and oh joy, we are reconnected so I catch up on all the updating of the emails and ring back the eleven people who have left messages on my landline.  I also catch up with the would be buyers of the house in town.  Over Easter, they had come to an agreement to pay a certain amount of damages which may be awarded to the other side if the sellers agree to sell to them.  The sellers advocate had then come back and said they would need to increase their exposure by at least three times so now they are very unhappy and much stressed.  We have supper and by the time we have finished eating, the internet and the phone have disappeared again.  Oh bugger, bugger.