Enjoyed a wonderful living in Brittany. They had relocated to Brittany from York in the year 2000, following having retired from teaching, and were beginning to buy renovations homes and sell them to earn a living. They stayed in a 300-year-old stone house by the lake.
“My mum died in 1995 when she was only 63,” says Jez, who has requested that his surname not be used. “That gave me a real kick in the pants to do something, which I always say is the best inheritance you’ll ever get.”
Their closest neighbor was only 1 km away, and they had no idea they’d leave their beautiful location. When the pandemic struck, the world changed.
Jez and Julie thought about what could happen in the event that they fell sick. They were in a lonely place, and traveling bans meant that no family members would be capable of visiting to take care of them. Julie also wanted to be close to her parents, who were aging and living in the UK. “As occurred to a number of individuals, this pandemic sparked our thinking. We mulled and ahh-ed but ultimately decided that it was vital to return.”
Not able to travel for meetings, they searched the property website Rightmove for a suitable property and eventually bought a home in Scunthorpe just based on photos. The purchase was approved in January of 2021, and they finally were able to move out in April at the time that France lifted their travel rules. However, the process was and is, as Jez describes it, “traumatic.”
“I was foolish in my own eyes’ … the Scunthorpe home Jez purchased online in rural France.
“We pulled up outside and my first words were: ‘What the hell have we done?’ We’d had 20-odd years of being in the middle of nowhere and suddenly we were at the bottom of a small cul-de-sac,” says Jez, who is determined to point out that the fact that there wasn’t anything wrong in the street he grew up on, and that the people he shared it with are “very friendly and welcoming.”
“When we first saw the images on the internet, we thought “OK, let’s try it’, but once the time came to arrive, we were aware of how much our lives had changed. In the twenty years we’d lived living in France, Britain has changed drastically. It’s now a 24/7 society. However, it wasn’t the same as it was when we quit. It didn’t feel as I had hoped it would. It was an error on my part.”
Jez, as well as Julie, quickly determined that they should do some repairs to the house and then move the fastest they could. After a year they made the move to Whitby and remained close to family but in a home much like their home in France. It was also an apartment they had seen in person a number of times.
“Never, ever would I do it again,” Jez says. Jez. “And hopefully there’ll never be another time when we’ll be forced into doing it.”
Considering how stressful it is to buy a house and the vast sums of money involved, it’s hard to understand why anyone would think of buying a place they hadn’t visited in person unless they had no choice because of the distances involved or travel restrictions. But even before Covid changed the world, in-person viewings were falling. In the year to February 2018, 37% of buyers surveyed by the insurer Aviva bought unseen. That figure had risen to 44% by 2019.
The practice grew drastically during the lockdowns for pandemics. Aviva’s survey of more than 2200 individuals found that over half (58 percent) of those who purchased an apartment in the period between April 2020 to June 2021, didn’t see it in person. Even now, even though there aren’t any restrictions, this is still happening more often than you believe.
As of May, for instance, Claire and Thomas moved from Bristol to Kingsbridge in Devon after they bought a home they’d glimpsed in the form of a WhatsApp video. “It was the only thing we could have done,” says Claire, 33. “We had a strict budget and maybe four homes we could have selected. It was that simple. After a purchase failed after we had checked all the boxes and gone to look it up and viewed it, we went to it and made an offer for the largest house of the ones that are remaining. Sometimes, in this life, we are unable to be in control of all the factors and must take risky decisions. We believe that our choices paid off.”
Ian Jepson is a regional executive for the Estate agent trade body Propertymark and is also the local partner for Michael Graham estate agents in Northampton. He has been selling homes for over 34 years and witnessed the growth of buying unviewed homes over the years, thanks to advances in technological advances like 3D mapping 360-degree photography, virtual tours that make it easier for buyers who are considering buying. Ten or five years ago, he might have told, just like Jez and Jez, that nobody should ever purchase without a live view. “Now, I wouldn’t,” says he, adding that he could see the future in which house tours are possible with an VR headset. If the buyer and seller have the right information they require, he suggests: “Go for it.”
Lorna and Matthias, who purchased an apartment at Omeath, Ireland, during the pandemic, without knowing about it before. Photograph: Johnny Savage/The Guardian
That’s the strategy adopted by Lorna Walker, 50, and her husband, Matthias, 51, in purchasing their house without seeing it. It was crucial to conduct research.
They decided to move out of the UK during the initial stages of the epidemic and moved into their new home situated in Omeath, Ireland, in October of 2020. Not just did Lorna and Matthias never seen the area in person and had not even visited the region of the country that they now proudly call their home.
“We had been discussing moving to live in the EU ever since Brexit happened,” says Lorna. Her father was Irish. “I have visited different regions in Ireland in Ireland and Northern Ireland – I studied in Belfast in the 1990s, but not the one I currently reside in. We were more or less glued to an image on a map.”
This pin was a mere 500m within Ireland and fulfilled most aspects of Lorna and Matthias’s needs: half way in between Dublin and Belfast and they are located near ferry ports, and within the range of three airports, which makes it easy to return home to UK or to Matthias’s homeland in Germany. It was also essential that Lorna’s mom, located in the Midlands, could be able to move into their home in the near future, and that would not have been possible if they’d moved to Europe.
When they honed in on the location, Lorna joined local Facebook groups, followed every locally-based businesses via social media, and discovered the closest supermarkets and hospitals.
“There’s a lot you can learn from Google Maps and the Instagram accounts of nearby cafes,” she states. “We were able to define what we wanted from our home, as everyone else. In the time of our purchase, there were many options in the area, in addition to the fact that an estate representative created a video tour of the home. The house was once an B&B and there was a bit of details on the internet regarding this. We knew about the possibility that estate agents could make it look fancy, but we did a survey as well and it was more real.”
Lorna, who is the director of a digital marketing company says she, as well as Matthias, who is in the field of education, did not make the decision to do the things they took lightly. “We are not rich people,” she declares. “This was a very serious financial commitment, not a glib purchase.”