The Doer-Upper becomes Le Bargain Hunter.

Le Sporting is an unassuming little cafe on St Tropez's famous Place des Lices.

Even at this time of the year it's packed from breakfast through to dinner, mainly with locals.

Pushing my way through the crowded smokers terrace at 7.30 in the morning I felt lucky to get a table, a coffee and a chance to read the paper in the warm.

What I didn't feel so happy about was the bill. €4.90 for a cafe au lait.

Even the grossly over priced Gail's (or any of London's top end cafe chains) wouldn't dare charge that.

At these prices, I wonder how the French can afford to live. Except of course that these are not your typical French. These are the tradesmen, shopkeepers, notaires, vignerons and local landowners who have got rich on the back of a once booming local property market.

Across the Place is a large branch of Credit Agricole where some of those sipping their small espressos around me probably have credit balances running into millions.

Others around me are looking somewhat less content. The estate agents in particular.

For them, the last couple of years have been unusually lean.

Monsieur Hollande and the Eurozone financial mess have combined to make a second home in Saint Tropez a luxury few can justify.

Buying the house is one thing, owning it is another.

There are myriad local and national taxes, astonishingly high building renovation costs, daft hourly rates for gardeners, cleaners and maintenance workers and frighteningly authoritarian government powers.

(If you think I joke about French government powers, procure a copy of British Airways' High Life. In this month's issue John Simpson recounts how five police kitted out in riot gear took a battering ram to the front door to his Paris flat when he owed the local mairie €220.)

Homes from €1m up to €10m where people need finance have been hardest hit. Getting a French mortgage was always incredibly difficult, now it's almost impossible. The amount of paperwork you need to supply beggars belief, and the hoops you need to jump through would test an Olympic athlete.

As a result, I've never seen local agents with so many houses on their books (in stark contrast to those around me in Chelsea).

That MUST mean there are bargains to be had. And that's why I'm here, in an almost closed up town in the cold and wet.

I spotted what looked a good opportunity online, asked my trusty ex-business partner Murray to take a quick peek and then, on his say so, headed down to check it out myself.

It's a truly horrible house. Very small at around 84 m2. Derelict really. Neither old enough to have any character, nor recent enough to have been well built.

The problems don't end there. It's in an 'agricultural zone' so you can only add 30% to its size. There's a busy road only 300 yards away. And most of the one acre garden is in fact a working vineyard (I don't drink).

So why would anyone fly the best part of 1000 miles, then drive for 90 minutes and check into a shockingly grotty hotel in a dark, empty town for the sake of seeing this clearly useless property.

Because it's a bargain. And you don't get bargains in St Tropez. Or, you didn't.

For all its downsides, the property is a mere 3 minutes from one of the most fashionable beaches in the world - Pampelonne. Le Club 55 is just down the road. It is a hop, skip and jump to the beautiful, unspoilt hill town of Ramatuelle. And it is in an area that, come summer, will be at the hub of a multi-millionaires' playground.

The busy road at the bottom of its drive is the Route des Plages, a beautiful, snaking, undulating, umbrella pine lined road off which little tracks lead down through thickets of bamboo to the 5km long beach.

Johnny Hallyday, the naughty boy French version of Cliff Richard, lives a few hundred yards across the fields behind high gates to keep out le riff raff. Across the road, there's the grand holiday home of a once famous fashion photographer and his ex-model wife. And hidden away on single file back roads only traversed by locals, the lavish homes of bankers, northern european royals and assorted cashed-out business folk are pampered and primped like the spoilt offspring of Oligarchs.

To buy even the most unattractive property on an acre of land in this area for under €1m would have been unthinkable only a couple of years ago. Indeed, this property first went on the market well over a year ago and at well over that price.

Now the owner has reduced his expectations by around 15%, and is unlikely to get even that.

Buying it is an exciting if daunting prospect, and I leave Saint Tropez with a sketch book full of ideas and a detailed renovation costing from Murray.

For less than £1m we could end up with a small but beautiful 3 or 4 bedroom house with a pool set amidst the vines in one of the most desirable locations on the Med.

BUT, and it's a very big 'but', as my plane bumps and judders its way back up towards Heathrow, I can't help wondering whether I can actually face the personal turbulence of owning another property in France.

The never-ending bureaucracy, the taxes, the unfriendly neighbours, the slow grind of the planning process, the arrogance of their building trades,the uncertainty of their property market and the €4.90 cafe au laits.

Le Petite Vigne, as Murray and I have named the property, might appear, on paper, to be a bargain. But is it really a bargain if it comes with a lot of problems?

Back in London the talk is of bubbles not bargains.

In a frenzied market where desperate young people are over-paying for everything, my chances of buying an investment property to do up are remote. (Even with one of the best buying agents on my side.)

And our six month personal search for a retreat in Somerset has only turned up lots of over-priced characterless shoe boxes.

So, what do I do? Write a piece for the blog, of course.

The Doer-Upper Gossip Column....February.

I don't always have a soap-box to jump on or a disaster to report on. So, new for 2014, here's my first irregular Gossip Column:

Bloody Neighbours

We are about to start work renovating 'Wrecksville W8' and in preparation we had the front garden cleared by a terrific bloke called Andy McCormack who I found on Rated People.

As he was busy stripping out various overgrown plants in the pouring rain, the neighbouring front door opened and the elderly resident (she's actually Lady somebody or other) poked her head out. Most of us might have expected her to offer this hardworking, self-employed and rather wet gardener a cup of tea.

Not this little old Daily Mail reader. She simply shouted "Bloody Foreigners" and then slammed shut the door again.

Fortunately, being more English than most of us, Andy took no offence. (He did suggest, however, that the next time I visited the house I should take my passport with me.)

I'm now rather worried how she'll react when there's a whole troupe of Polish builders on site in a couple of weeks time.

Blame the agents

I have an American friend who lives in Streatham. Strangely, he seems to like it.

Anyway, he and his new wife are keen to add to what I call their local buy-to-let property portfolio ( a slightly pretentious description of their 3 flats).

Such is the demand in this unassuming part of London, however, that he's having trouble buying anything. One bedroom flats are going to sealed bids the day they come to market. And then selling for unheard of prices.

Last week in his frustration he wrote to say "estate agents are now charging crazy prices."

The phrasing of this is interesting in that it assumes that agents just make up the prices. And I wonder how many others blame the agents for driving the rise in prices.

Even a drop-out from economics studies like myself understands that it's the market not the sellers that determines prices. But such is our national distaste for the role of the agent that we're happy to blame them for anything and everything. Including a housing market 'bubble'.

If it wasn't for the fact that their commissions keep getting fatter, I could almost feel sorry for them.

Somerset, the level-headed approach

For about six months now we've been looking for a small place to buy in Somerset.

The fact that this county has recently become a very large inland lake is a bit of a worry. And, to be honest, has rather put me off the idea.

So I emailed a friend who already has a house there and asked if his property was affected.

His reply was as follows: "we resisted buying in any area with the words 'levels' , 'lower' , 'under' , 'bottom' , 'brook', 'mill'  or 'lake' in the address."

Sensible man. Brilliant answer.


France Calling

As readers of this blog and my Tweets will know, I have a love/hate relationship with France.

We have owned 5 properties there and done well out of them both financially and in terms of lifestyle.

The country is fine, the problem is the French themselves. Many are lazy or unpleasant or just deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of Anglo-Saxon enterprise. Their taxes are onerous and spiteful. Their paperwork ridiculous and antiquated. Their rules and regulations unfathomable.

These days even their food is often below the standards of a decent English country pub.

Because of this, I swore we'd never return.

But, in truth, I love Saint Tropez and its surrounding area. Especially when it's not August and not packed with the chavs and chav-nots of Greater Europe.

Out of peak season it's a quaint town, with quiet, unspoilt beaches. Rural but sophisticated. Developed but not over-built (unlike the Cannes end of the coast).

So, when I saw a tiny little place right at the heart of its beaches priced at what looked like 'le snip' my resistance melted.

Ok, so it's only 1000 sq ft and close to a busy road. Ok, so it comes with an acre of vineyard (and I don't drink). OK, so I can't afford it and there's lots of work to do.

But if I let my head rule my heart, I'd never buy anything.

Whether we'll actually buy it or not, I don't know. But I think it's proved that I don't really want to live in the wetlands of SW England.

Property Doctor

On Saturday I'm due to take a look at a west London property owned by a GP practice. The doctors are thinking of retiring early....and they can afford to because years ago they bought the freehold of the building in which they have a surgery.

The floors above the surgery they have always rented out as flats, but they're now thinking of redeveloping the whole building and selling off the flats one by one.

After owning it for about 20 years, it could prove to have been the ideal (if accidental) pension plan.

They've already calculated that they could earn more from redeveloping the property than they have in their entire GP careers.

I'm not sure whether this implies we undervalue GPs. Or over value property.


Location, Location, Square Footage

I don't remember ever knowing the square footage of the first few houses we bought.

The one in Putney was a pretty big semi, the one in Fulham was sort of standard size terraced, and my flat in Queen's Club Gardens was the size a one bedroom flat should be.

We bought them because we fell in love with them, the price was sort of right and they were where we wanted to live. It would never have crossed my mind to check the price per square foot.

Now, it seems to me, that's all changed.

Agents have taken property and turned it into a mathematical equation rather than an emotional judgement.

We're all obsessed with pushing out every wall, roof and basement to create more of the most valuable thing in London - square footage.

And property viewers are as likely to turn up with a calculator as they are a colour chart.

I understand why its gone this way, and I'm as guilty as anyone when it comes to checking the value of a property.

But it's still a shame, somehow.

It is perhaps the most telling example of how property has become an investment first, and a home second.

We interrupt this Blog for a New Year Party Political Broadcast.

As the nation's property big guns heralded New Year with a glass of vintage champers at their country estates, we were sipping lukewarm still water roughly 35,000 feet above Siberia on the way to Hong Kong.

The ever-so British pilot did at some point say that it was 10 seconds to midnight in the UK, and unenthusiastically proceeded to countdown to New Year. But most of the HK Chinese asleep around me couldn't have cared less. And it did seem rather pointless given it was already well into 2014 below us in the icy steppes.

Our annual visit to my stepson (and property partner) began with an evening trip across to Kowloon on the Star Ferry. This is the perfect introduction to the city. You are on a rusting, bobbing piece of traditional old HK looking at a vividly illuminated and utterly breathtaking futuristic skyline that makes New York look positively dowdy.

It's an intoxicating view and sitting there on the ferry's aged wooden benches you can almost feel the pulsating energy of the city's economy reflected in the evening light show.

This is an island city where, hemmed in by sea and hills, the ever higher buildings are both necessary and a potent symbol of Hong Kong's ambition.

For a number of years, property prices have been climbing even higher than the towers. Recently, however, things have gone decidedly flat in the local market.

Last time I was in our old colony, the Beijing controlled local government suddenly imposed a massive hike in property taxes. This was designed to cool a feverish market and its certainly done that.

Sales have fallen off a cliff, over 1000 estate agents have lost their jobs and dozens of EA offices have closed.

Prices don't seem to have fallen much, but buyer interest has. A beautiful penthouse we know in an good part of the Western District has had just one viewing in the 3 months since it hit the market. A year ago it might well have sold within days.

If the imposition of higher taxes can have this effect in a dynamic market like HK, just think what they could do in the more fragile environment of London - where the recovery is patchy and markets are hyper-sensitive.

As we all know, further proposed property taxes threaten London's top end market. And when the top end comes under pressure there's a top-down effect across the entire city.

I have a rich friend (well, I like to call anyone rich a friend, don't you) who is just about to put his £15m London house on the market. Not because he particularly wants to sell. Not even because he actually needs the money. No, it's because, like most of us, he hates paying tax.

He's selling up because he's worried about the threatened Mansion Tax.

In France, where he has another beautiful house, he already faces annual wealth taxes. Add an extra confiscatory tax to his London property and life really does become tougher. Even for those nibbling at the foot of the Rich List.

It seems that wherever you look governments are tapping the property owning rich to help paper over their own continuing mismanagement of the economy.

That's not just unfair, it's potentially disastrous.

In France, of course, it would be par for the course. They have a pathological loathing of anyone with money and, as a result, have an increasingly weak, and largely state-based economy.

In Britain, however, I like to think we have a more grown-up attitude to the role of government and the value of wealth-creating individuals.

I have lived in London for about 40 years, and while the place has undoubtedly got richer in that time it's certainly not as a result of government spending.

Indeed the bits that our taxes pay for like schools, hospitals, roads and public transport seem to have made little or no progress. If anything, they are arguably far worse.

What's made our city richer has been the massive influx of other nationalities, a tax environment that has encouraged us to create jobs and wealth and, in the 80s, the liberalisation of financial regulation that enabled the City to become a global powerhouse.

When I first arrived here, the only people it was hard to understand turned out to be Australians living in Earl's Court bedsitters.

Today, I can probably overhear a dozen different languages just walking to the corner shop. (And no, for those who know me, the corner shop I'm thinking of isn't Harrods.)

If I'm honest, this can be a bit disconcerting, but overall it's a wonderful compliment to us that so many people from all over the world want to come to our city. Either to spend money, or make it.

Unlike Hong Kong, our attraction isn't the presence of a nearby emerging superpower like China, it's much more subtle and much easier to destroy.

While the HK property market may take a battering for a while, it will survive because people who want to trade with China have to be there.

People don't have to be in London.

They are here because they choose to be in a country that respects the endeavours and aspirations of people seeking to improve their position, and doesn't overly penalise those who've 'made it'.

I may, these days, have a slightly posher accent and live in Chelsea but my mother was a cleaner for many years and my father a worker who never earned more than £20 a week in his life.

Nobody stopped me moving out of my background. It was actually easy. In London, even 40 years ago, I could be anything I wanted.

That's what I loved, and still love, about the place.

And it's this largely intangible appeal of our remarkable capital that could be so quickly derailed by the populist posturing of a Vince Cable (or, for that matter, the barking banter of Boris Johnson).

I'll give you a couple of examples:

Just 100 yards from a flat we recently sold, a Saudi royal family owns a large house and several flats. When they're in town, they employ 5 drivers on permanent standby. They also employ cleaners, caterers, gardeners, builders and many others. They don't work themselves, of course, so they go shopping or go to restaurants.

In other words, they pour money into the London economy. Vast quantities of it. The benefits of this far outweigh any that might be gained from imposing some nasty, spiteful Mansion Tax. Especially since the tax might curtail or even end their visits.

Bye bye jobs. Hello, lots more benefit claimants. How sensible is that?

At the other end of the spectrum, we have employed the same cleaner for the last 13 years. She arrived as a young Polish woman. She had a husband and a young child, but left them behind in her home country to try to make a better life for them here. Thanks to London and her sacrifice, she has slowly built a far better life. The whole family now live here. They aren't rich, but they have a decent home, make reasonable money and have a future that's decidedly rosier than it was.

London gave Anna and her family that chance. And even though her somewhat guarded Polish attitude sometime irritates, I am proud that our city gave her that opportunity.

Confiscatory taxes on the rich don't just affect the rich. They also ultimately affect thousands like Anna. People who contribute far more to our economy than they ever take from government handouts. (Unlike the often lazy, benefit cheating English people we'd occasionally employed before.)

Anyway, enough of the political drum beating. You get the point, I hope.

Property taxes, for the rich or anyone else, are of course only a small element of the mix. But they can, as Hong Kongers will tell you, have a devastating effect.

In London, the ridiculous stamp duty structure has already dealt a heavy blow to the market over £2m. Any further tinkering could be utterly disastrous.

Immense wealth and abject poverty have always been a part of our city. And, in all the time I've been here, I have never seen any evidence that you can eradicate one by heavily taxing the other.

Quite the reverse, in fact.

An Open Letter to my so-called 'Buyer'.

Dear Sir,


Almost a month ago now you made an offer for our house in Abingdon Road, London W8.

It was a good offer, £2.2m in cash. You also agreed to exchange contracts within 5 working days of the papers being in order.

You did all the right things. A good firm of solicitors was appointed. You quickly nominated an overseas company to make the acquisition. And you were happy for our agent to talk to your Finance Director and confirm your company's status and intent.

The necessary papers were all quickly collated. Questions answered. Queries sorted.

The solicitors were ready to exchange. All they needed was you and your deposit money.

At this stage, even the profoundly cynical, like myself, might have believed things were on track for a successful and speedy conclusion.

Then you disappeared. Went off the radar. Didn't answer emails. Or phone calls.

Apparently you were in 'the States' for Thanksgiving. Couldn't be contacted.

That's strange. After all, you have offices in four countries and according to your website conduct offshore investments on behalf of international investors.

You should therefore, by now, have mastered the art of picking up a phone or tapping out an email. But seemingly not. You apparently have to be physically present in the London office to conduct business in London.

These days the euphemism for a delaying tactic is not "it's in the post", it's "he's travelling." And you have used this relentlessly.

Yesterday, for example, our agents received an email from you (finally) saying that you had "arrived from the US at 1pm and would be flying to Dublin at 9am in the morning". It's nice of you to keep us posted on your itinerary, but honestly don't bother. It's not remotely impressive or in any way an excuse.

(Just in case you were wondering, I'm travelling to Clapham for lunch today and will be heading to Mells in Somerset and then Bristol tomorrow morning.)

Your cash offer also seems to have morphed into a much less desirable deal requiring Lloyds Bank funding. This was casually dropped into a your recent email with hardly a comment, yet it's a fundamental change.

We aren't interested in your travel schedule, your financial arrangements or your internal approval systems. We are interested however in the fact that you have wasted my time, our agent's time, the time of two solicitors and caused all of us enormous frustration.

You are at the very least disingenuous, possibly a fantasist, but mostly just an arrogant bastard.

Your company is named after a famous cigarette brand (sadly not Marlboro, because the cowboy connection would be most appropriate). But dealing with you is far more dangerous to one's health than a few fags.

You had a chance to acquire a very rare, unmodernised W8 terraced house in a rising market. You messed up, and and we will now redevelop the property ourselves. Which is a shame for your clients.

We don't need to deal with rude, insincere buyers like yourself. And won't.

Yours faithfully

The Doer-Upper.

Under Offer shouldn't mean Under Consideration.

So far one of our properties has gone 'under offer' three times and still there's no sale.

It seems that some property buyers make offers the way politicians make promises. Without any idea whether they can or even want to make good their offer/promise.

I do understand, of course, that there will always be good reasons for house sales to fall through. But all too often it seems that making an offer is little more than a ploy.

A gambit designed to buy the buyer more time to consider the property.

There should in my view be a price to pay for messing with sellers in this way.

And the simplest price would be an offer deposit, only repayable if a survey, search or legal enquiry throws up a genuine and significant issue.

Of course, sellers can insist on this now. It's not unknown. But according to my solicitor it can take two weeks and a fair few hours of a lawyer's expensive time to concoct one of these agreements.

That is typical legal world self-interested bullshit. There should be a standard agreement that can be signed the same day as the offer.

This might stop some of the ludicrous 'about-turns' from buyers that I've experienced over the past year.

In one case, for example, the buyer decided that the lack of a bath (it has a shower, in case you're wondering) was sufficient reason to back out. Two weeks after agreeing an offer!

This absurd time and money wasting behaviour is not only frustrating, it borders on deliberate dishonesty.

Currently our 'wreck' in W8 is under offer for the third time. The 'buyer' agreed a five day exchange, briefed a solicitor, made all sort of reassuring noises (it's a company) and then......disappeared for two weeks. The decision makers are apparently in the US. But this is a blatant lie as we know that the person concerned arrived back in London earlier this week.

Whether we sell it isn't actually critical to me. I'm more than happy to redevelop the property myself.

I'd just like to know one way or the other.

So, I've decided to put something else under consideration.

Naming and shaming the sham buyers I come across.

A tale of two markets. The agonising story of our first sale.

A few weeks ago now we finally exchanged contracts on the sale of our first project.

I cannot believe how long its taken to sell this little studio flat in SW3. Literally months.

Anyone who tells you the Prime Central market is a doddle clearly knows diddly squat. I had read the PR headlines and, as a result, rather assumed the world would be queuing round our elegant Chelsea garden crescent to make outrageous over-the-asking-price offers. They weren't.

Actually, that's not quite true. Within 24 hours of our original agent being hired, we did have an offer at the full asking price. But after that offer fell through we had months when almost nothing happened.

We added another agent. Dropped the price (considerably). Still nothing worth discussing.

The agents all said how wonderful the flat was (well, they would, wouldn't they). But of actual offers there was a severe drought.

We thought about pulling it off the market for the summer, but it hardly seemed worth the bother. Would anyone actually notice? Would it really make any difference?

Then, in August of all months, a couple walked past the Knightsbridge agent's window and took a fancy to our flat.

'Walk-ins' as the trade calls them are usually regarded with immense suspicion. These days nobody looks for a property on the street; they look at screens, portals and agents' websites. Only bored tourists, nosey-parkers and fantasists walk in off the street and ask to see a property.

So it took quite a bit of convincing by our buyers to get the agent to take them seriously.

Eventually they were permitted a viewing. And they loved it. Or at least, the wife loved it.

The husband thought it was far too much for one room (and he comes from Hong Kong where prices are as ludicrous as London).

Not surprisingly, their first offer was way off.

We and they hummed and harumphed via the smooth talking agent, and eventually the offer grudgingly nudged up £25k. Still not enough we said. And that's where it seemed to stall.

The buyer went off abroad for a while, the conversation petered out and any optimism I felt went with it.

A week later I was persuaded by a different agent to take an 'exclusive sneak preview' of another 'opportunity' on the same road as ours.

It was so 'exclusive' that I found myself outside the flat with six other potential buyers and an embarrassed agent who hadn't got the keys.

I fell into conversation, for want of anything else to do, with a very pleasant couple who seemed as disinterested in the viewing as I was.

Within minutes we discovered that they were the potential buyers of my flat, the front of which we could actually see from where we were waiting.

It transpired that they'd just landed from a few days in Geneva, and only as the plane's wheels hit the runway back at Heathrow had the husband admitted to his wife that their offer on my flat had been turned down.

The wife wasn't best pleased. So, after a cursory peek at a dreary little flat with all the other 'exclusive previewers', we retired to my flat - the one they'd hoped to buy.

We clearly all got on, and after a bit of haggling shook hands on a price £25k up from the one I'd rejected.

Before exchange took place, we then had to contend with the idiotic posturing of the buyer's solicitor who was about as pragmatic as North Korean diplomacy. This held things up for weeks as we argued about wood floors, building control and the managing agents paperwork.

More important than all this detail however is the wide difference between the perceived state of the PCL market and the reality.

A Knightsbridge agent just published a report proudly boasting that their sellers were achieving 97% of guide prices. Well, in our case the agent achieved around 85% of the original guide price....and it took four months and my help to achieve that.

Not quite the booming, fast moving market we're led to believe.

Oh, and by the way, that other flat on our street I went to see is still on the market after two price reductions. And the agent for that flat said (with a straight face) that we had to see it that day in August as it would probably sell within HOURS.


_________________________________________________

PS. Some might think that this piece runs counter to my previous blog about buyers being the dodgy ones, not the agents. Not at all. The agents I mention here are all perfectly honest, good guys. Just a little too quick to believe their own and others' hype, sadly.

It's not the agents who are dodgy in London, it's the buyers.

The other day Channel 4 ran a much trumpeted 'expose' on the questionable practices of some estate agents when it comes to mortgage finance. I didn't see it, but Twitter was awash with reaction, recrimination and, in one case, regret.

It all sounded terribly obvious, and so NOT news.

With the possible exception of a John Lewis salesperson, when would you ever completely take the word of someone trying to flog you something?

Whether it's a major political leader, a humble used car salesman or an Eton educated estate agent, you just know that their own interests come way ahead of yours.

What would make a far more original and contemporary report Mr Channel 4 Commissioning Editor would be an investigation into the iffy characters now buying up London property.

I can't quite believe some of things that have been happening on the sale of our second project, a small Kensington house. I need to write them down just to confirm to myself that they're real.

The first deal, agreed off-market, became mired in murky eastern european 'mafia' connections, and the second, on the open market, produced a dodgy offer that had more than a hint of tax avoidance.

Unbelievable though it may seem, I am NOT joking.

The first buyer apparently worked for a controversial billionaire rumoured to be connected to the shadowy head of a powerful organised crime syndicate.

Because of this, our buyer's application for a mortgage (probably not sold to him by the agents) sparked a bank enquiry into his connections.

I could understand this if we were talking oligarch sums, but we're not. The amount he was seeking to borrow probably wouldn't fill the fuel tank of a super-yacht.

It seems the bank's extensive credit checks even run to a Google search these days, and a couple of clicks had quickly exposed the question marks surrounding our buyer's employer.

Whether these rumoured connections are in any way true, I have no idea. For all I know it's just an unjustified smear put about by political rivals. That's the problem with the web, it's full of unsubstantiated rumour.

Sadly, after a few weeks, we had to rule this guy out. It just didn't look as though the banks were in the mood to lend to him.

The second buyer, who was one of many dozens to view the property, seemed altogether more solid.

He was from southern Europe. So, from my point of view, still a bit of a worry. But the agent had done her homework and reassured me with details of the buyers prestigious London address and impressive worldwide portfolio of past and present property projects.

All looked set fair for a fast exchange. But I just couldn't get rid of the slightly churning sensation in my gut which usually signals worry and uncertainty.

And sure enough, a couple of days after agreeing the deal a disturbing email arrives. His solicitor asks if I could meet with their client to discuss "the nature of the deal".

"What the f...k does that mean", I not so politely asked the agent.

Told that he just wanted my view on planning issues, I pretended to be out of town and offered to call the 'buyer' rather than meet him.

The moment the slow, heavily accented voice answered the mobile I just knew we were in trouble. It was like there was virgin olive oil seeping out of my handset, such was the oozing, slippery nature of the conversation.

No, he had not agreed the price, apparently. (Even though he'd signed a written offer specifying the amount, and even though he had aggressively pushed me and the agent to accept this offer.)

No, all along, apparently, we were supposed to know that he had really only ever offered £250k LESS than the offer we had in writing.

Funnily enough this would bring his offer magically below the £2m Stamp Duty band. Well, well.

No (and I keep starting sentences like this because he did), he couldn't go above this but.....as he owned various properties around Europe perhaps we would like to take holidays in these places by way of compensation for our disappointment.

I don't know about you but £250k is slightly more than my usual holiday budget. Not only that, the offer was clearly dodgy, almost certainly illegal.

Both the agent and I quickly, and very thoroughly, washed our hands of this appalling time waster.

The man was either completely mad, or something rather more sinister.