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London estate agents
For most of April and May I've been undertaking the Sisyphean task of finding suitable living accommodation in London, based on a fairly lengthy list of requirements and a rather sparse budget.
I must have seen more than 50 properties since the start of the search, dealing with more than a dozen different agencies. I now have a much better understanding of London geography (at least North and West London), and to my dismay an even better understanding of Estate Agent Psychology.
Herein some of the fun things I've learnt.
Firstly, all London estate agents are criminals. That's a little harsh - I mean to say they are lovely people, and genuine and honest professionals, as described on Greene & Co's website. I couldn't agree more, except for Greene & Co, who stood me up after I'd travelled 45 minutes by rush hour tube and walked 15 minutes in the pouring rain to a viewing. The bastards. Anyway, accept that there will be underhand tactics and dubious psychology at play when dealing with estate agents and your life will be much happier.
Foxtons are probably the worst for consistently over-valuing properties. I've seen shabby squats with them that are priced double or triple what competing agencies would charge in the area. But they do have the coolest cars (those racing colours minis) so that's ok. And actually, one property I saw with them was on for a bargain price. Unfortunately, they also required the tenants to allow potential purchasers to view the house once a week, as the landlord tried to sell it. Hmmm. Anyway, Foxtons certainly polarise opinions.
Be aware that all agents are fundamentally incapable of emailing you properties that match your requirements. Looking for 2 bedrooms? Expect to receive emails for one bedroom or studio apartments. No matter what your budget, you will always be shown properties at least £100 per week over the budget. Not keen on parrots? Expect to be sent "a parrot fancier's dream property!" at least a dozen times a week. In the world of estate agents, it's not the quality of the properties they email to you, it's all about the quantity.
Conversely when it comes to viewing time, if you show up with a list of more than three properties you'd like to see, you can almost guarantee you will be disappointed. There's a game estate agents like to play called "crap place, ok place, crap place", whereby for every nice but overpriced place they show you, they'll also bookend with two absolute horrors - often under the pretense of giving you an idea of what your money can get, but in reality to to psychologically pressure and panic you into paying over the odds for an average squat.
Sometimes getting the agents to show you properties can be like getting blood out of a stone. Especially on a sunny day, when they'll tell the rest of their office they are off to show you a dozen houses, and will then dump you after the first house and race off home for dinner or to get their nails done. Yes, this actually happened, several times. If you can do viewings early in the morning, you have a better chance of seeing more than one or two places before the agent runs for the nearest Nails R Us.
Female estate agents are required by law to wear impractically short skirts, high heels and fishnet tights. (My god. Did I really just complain about that? I must be really sick of their selling tactics.)
Most estate agents can park cars in gaps that I wouldn't consider parking a shopping trolley in. The notable exception (no discrimination intended) is the majority of the young female agents, who will cheerfully try and park in spaces better suited to shopping trolleys. I actually had to shout at one agent to stop her driving us into the path of an oncoming vehicle that had the right of way. The guys can drive, but unfortunately tend to drive like they are auditioning for Formula 1. Also London streets have lots of speed bumps. This is not a happy combination.
People are diverse, and if you think you've seen it all, you probably haven't. Viewing properties is a fascinating view of life, though often an unwanted one. For example there was the viewing where two foreign gentlemen were passed out in the flat after a heavy night (and morning) of drinking. It was off-putting to look around with one of them hastily picking up empty vodka bottles in his underwear. There's the family who were just cooking dinner (sorry I interrupted you), who seemed unconcerned about an excess of bacteria in the kitchen or the clouds of smoke, and quite terrified of daylight encroaching into the apartment.
There's the people that leave their most exotic laundry out to dry. That's nice compared to the ones that leave their very dirty laundry festering all over the apartment. There was one 'bargain' two bed apartment the size of a broom cupboard where four gentlemen were co-habiting, with a kitchen that was actually a cupboard in the lounge, and a bathroom with a ceiling black with mould. I asked the agent if they were planning to refurbish the place, for example replacing the radiator leaking onto the mushrooms growing on the lounge carpet, and was not too surprised to hear that cleaning would be up to the new tenants.
You can usually tell what sort of condition an apartment will be in before you step through the front door. One place I saw went to great lengths to give advance warnings, including copious rat traps in the communal corridor and stair well. The interior didn't disappoint, living up to the forewarning in a colourful riot of discarded food and unwashed, well, everything.
It's not all bad, and we did finally find a place that fulfills almost all our criteria and is even below our maximum budget. And one agency that managed to distinguish themselves and rise above the rest was Let's Do Business, crewed almost solely by antipodeans, who were refreshingly straight-forward and honest. We didn't end up getting a property through them, but they will be first on the list to call next time around.
Some of the nicer places made it onto a Flickr photo set of rentals.
Technorati Tags: apartment, estate agents, london, moving, renting
Ch-ch-ch-changes
So, it's been a bit quiet around here for the last few months as there's been a lot of changes going on. I've now got a bit more time to post some updates, the first of which is yet another relocation.
After 10 months of living and working in Brussels, I've moved back to the UK. For the last couple of months I've been searching for somewhere to live, and last week the furniture all arrived from Brussels and we finally moved in to a place in Hammersmith. Yep, that's right, I'm now in our nation's capital, far from the sleepy relaxed pace of life in Norwich.
The move was not without challenges (a rant on the evils of estate agents will be forthcoming very shortly), but it's all done now and there's just a mountain of boxes to unpack and furniture to re-arrange.
Technorati Tags: brussels, london, moving
Personal velocity
5.54km/h, in the last 310 days I travelled 52,644km and visited 16 cities.
More on my new public Dopplr profile.
Don't assume you're safe
One of the common myths about proprietary commercial off-the-shelf software is that because you pay for it, you get a certain inherent quality, reliability, level of features and protection from the worst case scenarios.
My recent experiences with Quickbooks has done everything possible to dispel that myth.
For years I've happily used Quickbooks 2003. It's simple and intuitive, and although clunky in a few places it mostly "just works".
A few months ago the bookkeeper was forced into an upgrade to Windows Vista by a hardware failure and a bad salesman at the local PC store. As a result, she was also forced to upgrade various software packages, since the versions she was using did not work on Vista. One such package was Quickbooks.
Faced with the option of finding a new bookkeeper or upgrading to the latest shiny version of Quickbooks, the upgrade seemed to be the simplest choice.
How wrong I was.
Firstly, Quickbooks 2008 is divided into multiple product lines, coming in "Simplestart", "Pro" and "Premier" editions. Having used the Intuit website's "Which Quickbooks is right for your business" test, I confidently bought and downloaded Simplestart. Unfortunately Simplestart did not support importing from Quickbooks 2003 or Quickbooks 2007.
I ponied up the money and bought Quickbooks Pro, sure that this would be the silver bullet. Yes, it did indeed support importing from older versions of Quickbooks. I rejoiced as I saw numbers flying before my eyes, and thought all was right with the world, until it was time to file a VAT return. Unfortunately, the Quickbooks import and upgrade delivers "more control and flexibility" than previous versions. To put it another way: it badly messes up recorded VAT information. I went from the expected VAT liability of a few hundred pounds to a VAT liability of many thousands of pounds during the "upgrade".
The solution according to the Quickbooks built-in help is to record various information before upgrading. Of course, this solution is posted in the support documentation provided as part of a Quickbooks 2008 install, so there's no way to know this before installing ....
Looking at the website, the VAT situation is so bad there's now an entire section on important VAT information, otherwise known as "Intuit broke your VAT and expect you to spend time fixing it, thank you for buying this product".
I downgraded to Quickbooks 2003 again to prepare the information I needed. Unfortunately Quickbooks 2003 does over-the-internet updates, and my company file is created by a more recent update of Quickbooks 2003. Repeated attempts to update Quickbooks result in errors with missing and incorrect files.
So here I am, with my data in a proprietary binary format that doesn't seem to work well with any version of the software that created it, a classic closed-source trap. I've wasted more time and effort than I care to think about, and I'd be happy to put a financial contribution toward anyone writing (or fixing) an Open Source company accounts package that plays nicely with UK financial regulations.
Now, back to trying to convince Quickbooks to work ... :-(
Technorati Tags: microsoft, open source, proprietary, purchasing, software, windows
No escape
I had a cunning plan to sneak back to Norwich tonight, to pick up some paperwork, water the plants, and so on. Unfortunately our great rail network had other plans:
"Operating incident", I was reliably informed by the guy at the ticket office (who amazingly unquestioningly refunded my ticket), is a euphamism for "some guy drove a lorry into the new bridge outside the station".
Figuring the packed tube to Stratford and onward trains would be a living hell, I decided to abandon my trip. The last diversion "via Stratford" took almost four hours to complete, and I really didn't fancy arriving at nearly midnight only to get up again at 5am.
Checking the various rail websites it seems the "operating incident" is still a problem:
Hurrah for the British transport network.
Update: Turns out it wasn't a lorry, but the muppets at Network Rail shuffling the bridge around while trains ran underneath. See Seconds from Disaster: Thousands stranded as rail bridge collapses.
Technorati Tags: accident, life, london, b0rkb0rkb0rk, trains, transport, uk
Unusual praise
So there I was, booking tickets via the Eurostar website, which was running horribly slowly and also failing to let me pick my seats, since the shiny website update they just did including seat selection does not work in Safari. I was muttering and cursing as it was a sunny Saturday morning and I really wanted to be outside, not stuck inside fighting with a computer again.
Travel times chosen, seats not selected, and personal details entered, and then my credit card was declined. Damnit, I thought, that's all I need, now I'm going to have to speak to the bank and find out what's wrong this time. Oh, and now my mobile is ringing, who the hell wants to speak to me and if this website session times out I'm going to be really annoyed.
And then I answered the phone, and it turns out it was the bank, calling because in the last three days they'd seen some unusual behaviour on my card. Was I renting an apartment in Bayswater? Yes. Was I buying flowers in Spain? Yes. Was I buying dinner in Brussels? Yes. And sir, how about Eurostar - did you just try to book that too? Yes!
It's nice to see the bank being so proactive. And my session didn't time out, and my card went through fine the second time around, and so I will be able to take the train back to Brussels on Friday night. All is good with the world.
I was reminded of this whilst reading Fraud.
Technorati Tags: banks, creditcards, fraud, purchasing
links for 2008-04-16
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links for 2008-03-20
Safari 3.1 (5525.13) and GMail
Since upgrading to the latest version of Safari this morning, I'm finding the HTMLArea on GMail is completely screwy, refusing to accept characters such as -, (), etc. and bouncing the focus all over the place. Am I just exceptionally lucky, or are others suffering too?
Technorati Tags: apple, gmail, google, mac, macosx, mail, osx
links for 2008-03-14
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