Problem 1 of n.

The plan, the one for the quick an easy sale... er... it's gone tits up already! I'll get onto that in a moment though.

I was woken this morning by the solicitor responding to the voicemail I left, she went through the particulars of the sale, and came up with a frightening figure for the purchase, the total bill will come to a little over £12K including over £10K stamp duty! Add to that £500-1000 for the surveyor and the 5% for the deposit and I'm going to need about £30-32K just to purchase this place... And that's assuming the price stays at £335K, which it won't. Eeek, I'd better start moving some money from my various investments and savings accounts. She told me to contact her once my offer on the property had been accepted and then she could get things underway. All very thorough and efficient, that's what I'm looking for.

As expected, shortly after that I got a call from the mortgage broker guy, he listened to my financial particulars, said he could see no problems and he would let the estate agency know to proceed.

Back to the problems...

Had a chat with the chaps who were going to pay me to work for them, seems the funds for the job are coming from the US, now I have another reason to viscerally hate GW Bush, his trashing of the US economy means that my almost employers can't afford to pay me due to the terrible exchange rate on the USD to GBP (or "Cable" as we call USD-GBP in the foreign exchange investment banking sector).

Luckily I was called about an hour before that conversation by an employment agency, saying that a Japanese investment house wanted to interview me for a position, so all is not lost! They will be getting back to me tomorrow with a date and time for the interview.

So it seems that I am unable to legitimately progress with the mortgage application. Note the use of the word "legitimately". Obviously I intend to carry on, on the offchance I manage to land the job from the interview or get a position after all the running around I did over the last week. More fingers crossed. If you haven't already got your fingers crossed, do so now. :) (If you have, cross them harder please. :D)

Predictably the vendor was not interested in my offer, no news there, I was expecting that.

The story stops being linear and goes a bit exponential here though.

The guy who phoned me from the estate agency to tell me this was not the guy who I have been dealing with to date. Now when someone does a switch like this, my first reaction is to want to know why. It is a common tactic in sales, to have a good cop/bad cop thing going on.

So I'm thinking, OK I have one guy who's really nice and shows me around the property always phoning me and keeping me informed and building up that rapport. Now I have been passed onto someone else to do the money thing, I'm thinking here comes the bad cop bit.

As it turned out, I'm right on the button!

This new guy claims that the vendor is actually a company working for a mortgage lender who has reposessed the property. (Well that explains the quick sale and the empty property I guess.) It turns out the way they do business is to find out what my biggest offer will be and decide if they are going to take that or not.

Since I wasn't born yesterday, I politely declined his offer to be totally shafted in the negotiations... Duh! He then became very aggressive with the salesmanship, "I know what you mean, but this is just they way these guys do business, I'm dealing with an administrator here, they're like robots, what is on their screen as the minimum price is all they will accept, they demand the top price you will pay and they work from there, so what's your top price?"

Obviously this guy was not getting the message, so I reiterated my position, "I don't care how they do business, I'm not telling you my top bid, you're working for them not me, so it's my job to know what I'll go up to, and its their job to meet me somewhere in the middle".

"Well they've rejected £335K, what are you prepared to top out at?"

I know this guy is just trying to play me, but I'm having no more of this, he's just asking me the same thing over and over again, and not listening to the bits he doesn't want to hear, I came back with, "I'll go to £340K".

"Is that you absolute maximum bid?"

"Maybe, maybe not, who knows, I may go to £350K, £400K, £450K, if they aren't going to give any hints or play the game, if they aren't going to come back with a counter offer, fine, I'm just going to increase my offer bit by bit until they accept or I hit the limit I may or may not have, tell them whatever you want, but I'm not playing the game their way."

"OK, I'll go to them and tell them your top bid is £340K".

"Yeah, you do that".

I was phoned up by the usual guy at the end of the working day, the chap I shall now dub Rapport (The other guy is going to be called Money-Man), "Just to let you know, the new offer has been passed over to the vendor, but they haven't come back to us yet, so you'll probably hear tomorrow".

Let's see what they come up with tomorrow, and hope that the interview comes though sooner rather than later. (Although I did tell the employment agency that I was available tomorrow and Monday only, in order to motivate them into quick action.)