Estate agents should know their stuff!

I wrote a post on this very subject a while ago, and things certainly haven't improved since then. In fact, I'm wondering if most agents are suffering from PBSD (Pre-Brexit Stress Disorder)?

Back in the 1980s and '90s, agents seemed to know their stuff. Before advertising a property for sale, they armed themselves with the full details, so that not only could they answer a question about how long the lease was, they could also tell you if the property had a combi boiler or not, and answer a query about who lived upstairs.

Not so now. On Wednesday morning, I rang three different agents about three different properties and asked the same question each time: how much is the service charge? Now, this is a basic piece of into that any agent should have at their fingertips. Lease length and service charge are the first questions buyers usually ask when hunting for a flat to buy.

Not one of the three was in the office. First off, I got a dippy-sounding girl who said, 'I dunno. I'm in Lettings. I'll pass your question on and get him to call you.' My call to the second agent elicited exactly the same response, except that this girl did at least sound as if her sleeping pills had worn off.

When I made my third phone call, all I got, after some excruciating music which sounded as if a rat was filing its claws on a xylophone, was an answering machine. I asked my question and hung up.

I waited for responses for the rest of the day. Not one deigned to ring me. On Friday, I did have a call from the third agent and I made an appointment to view next Tuesday. An hour later, I remembered a Very Important Question that I had forgotten to ask and I emailed the agent about it: is there a No Pets clause in the lease?

No response. This afternoon, I sent another email enquiry and said that if I hadn't heard from him by the end of Monday, he should cancel the viewing.

It takes me two hours each way to get from where I am currently living to N. London and I'm damned if I am giving up a day's freelance work only to find that cats aren't allowed. Last week, I was on the point of viewing a flat that had been on the market since October and had recently had £25k knocked off the price. It was a downstairs flat in a converted house and it had a huge, 120 ft garden.

I had just made the appointment to view and was chatting happily to the agent, when I happened to remark, 'My cat will really enjoy that garden.' There was a brief silence and then the agent told me, 'I'm afraid pets aren't allowed.' It was a share of freehold and it wasn't a purpose-built block with communal grounds, it was a conversion with the garden solely demised to that flat, so why weren't pets allowed? How could one quiet moggy interfere with the peaceful enjoyment of the upstairs owner's property? Or did they think it was going to lift its tail and spray the carpet in the communal hallway? If I could get my hands on that lease, I'd use it as a litter-try liner. No cats, indeed!

Really, when you're paying almost half a million for a 2-bed London flat, I think you should be allowed to keep a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, at the very least. Though I might draw the line at a crocodile.

Will I hear back from that agent before the Tuesday viewing? I bet I won't. You'd think the property market was awash with buyers at the moment, from the reluctance of agents to return phone calls and emails. Come on. I'm a rare cash (almost) buyer in this pre-Brexit slump. Pull your fingers out!