The Intermediary – August 2026 - Flipbook - Page 5
From the editor. . .
’m back, you’ll be thrilled to hear, with
more gripes about my homebuying
experience. These rants are becoming so
common I’m tempted to collate them into
some kind of Dickensian serial. Those of
you following along will likely already
be raising an eyebrow at the fact we are now
reaching a length of transaction time that even
our drawn-out system should be ashamed of.
I am not about to start ranting about service
level agreements or conveyancers, however. In
fact, our lawyers have been incredible – on the
ball both with our transaction and my personal
descent into madness. And our lender, well
they’ve delayed only as much as one might
expect, but nothing to write home (or to you
lot) about.
No, the real delays have been caused by – you
guessed it – the constant discovery of yet more
issues, structural problems, potential costly
repairs, and risks as time has gone on. This has
infuriated the seller, whose perspective is that we
should just ignore the fact that the roof is falling
in because they spent quite a lot on the kind of
fancy Japanese toilets that do your taxes while
you drop the kids off at the pool.
They see us geing a surveyor in for a standard
inspection as a cosmic betrayal, because it (we
now discover) means unexpected renegotiation,
delays while we cost repairs, and even more
questions from our solicitors. They believe we
should have just trusted them that the house was
perfect, bought it sight unseen, and le it at that,
I
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with our Japanese toilets to huddle around for
comfort as the walls crumbled around us.
I sometimes wonder how the whole process
– so stressful that the estate agent recently
called me in tears because she was so sick of
dealing with it – would have changed if this
kind of information was just part of the process,
upfront and expected. We would not be seen
as ‘problematic’ for wanting to know if we
were buying a house or an overturned tugboat
with a bad paint job, and the seller would have
come to market with a much more realistic
understanding of what their property was
actually worth.
At a recent mental health retreat (pub trip)
my husband – who has no involvement in this
industry beyond patiently listening to me – said
‘I don’t understand why this doesn’t get done as
standard, earlier, shared with all parties upfront,
and with equal if not heavier onus on the seller
to organise’. I, of course, snorted into my wine.
From the mouths of aircra engineers...
Many experts, much less belligerent than I,
weigh in on this issue in our pages this month.
Reading their comments about how impending
changes could revolutionise home buying has
been biersweet. I so desperately want the system
to change, I just wish it could have started sooner.
In the meantime, pray I get through this one
avoiding a total breakdown. More next month,
I’m sure... ●
Jessica Bird
@IntermediaryUK
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www.theintermediary.co.uk | Issue 43 | August 2026 | £6
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TAKING FLIGHT
The ‘Great Wealth Transfer’ and the future of property ownership
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