Chapter 10: 1991: The Crucial Year

Just on the issue of leafletting, about which people have sometimes expressed a degree of surprise and curiosity, I suppose the point was that I identified about twenty likely-seeming houses and addressed a letter to the occupant of each, expressing interest in their house and explaining that I had had an offer on my house in London and was therefore in a position to move quickly. I seem to remember that the property market was rather in the doldrums at that point, and that people were reluctant to put their houses on the market in case they hung around. (I may even have put this in the letter, but I don’t seem to have retained a copy of it!) The response was surprisingly good: I got about ten answers by post or phone. One person put the matter in the hands of their solicitors: leafleting is an unusual step, and in fact I’ve very rarely received a comparable approach during the time that I’ve been at Exmouth House. I remember that Jim Searson at The Sycamores responded asking a rather high price for his house, but others were more reasonable. The price that the Lucases wanted for West Hill Villa, including all the land and outbuildings associated with it, seemed quite good - I think about £250,000 -- though one shouldn’t underestimate the upkeep in that case, with its listed conservatory and other run-down annexes. One thing I would say about leafletting, however, is that you can’t expect a bargain: after all, if you’ve approached the owners saying how much you like their house, you’re bound to pay the full market price or slightly over. I think this was the case with Exmouth House, which turned out to be in even worse condition than it looked. I think I initially wondered about a price of £130,000 but had to settle for £145,000.

I’m amazed to find that, having seen Exmouth House for the first time on 30 January 1991, there is a copy of a letter from me to Mr & Mrs Willett dated 31 January confirming a verbal offer that I had made on the phone that morning for £145,000 subject to their paying for necessary repairs to the roof: this is in my folder about the purchase of the house. Then, the process of arranging a survey, getting a mortgage, etc., proceeded through the following couple of months, with a completion date fixed for 1 May: a string of letters from Dawson, Hart & Co, with Christopher Gauvain acting throughout, are to be found in the same folder. One matter that I remember is that at one point on the phone Mrs Willett referred to a construction date for the house on the basis of some deeds she had in front of her, but that these failed to arrive with the documentation relating to the house after completion of contracts. Later in May, therefore, Gauvain had to pursue these, and two bundles of deeds did indeed ultimately materialise from their solicitors. View image. It was odd and rather crafty of the Willetts to hold these documents back in this way, I suppose with the intention of retaining them as a kind of souvenir of the property. But all was well in the end: the deeds were subsequently expertly calendared by Christopher Whittick, and they form the partial basis of this history of the house.