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Filed Under Curtain Rods | Posted on December 15, 2007
Last week, Colchester County Court ordered Raymond Bennis and Susan Golding to pay ï¿¡1,166 in compensation to John and Sylvia McMahon, the couple who bought their home.
Mr and Mrs McMahon had offered ï¿¡285,000 for the detached house in Essex but later agreed to pay another ï¿¡10,000 for fixtures and fittings. Towards the end of the sale - as house prices continued their upward spiral - the buyers refused Bennis’ demand for another ï¿¡5,000.
When the McMahons took the keys to their new home, they discovered several items missing, including paving slabs from the garden, a heated towel rail from the bathroom and the electric pump from the cherub water feature. The items, deemed the judge, were included in the agreed selling price and, therefore, the McMahons were due compensation.
Although few cases get as far as the courts, the tight-fistedness of British homeowners over “fixtures and fittings” is astounding. Nothing is too small or too useless for a vendor to consider removing from a property: among the items that Bennis took were two plates carrying the house name and number, of limited use at his next home, unless it happened to share the same number.
Nor is this meanness a phenomenon limited to cost-conscious buyers at the lower end of the housing market; in fact, the more expensive the property, the more trouble the cutlery racks and lavatory roll holders seem to cause.
“After we sold one house, the new owners complained that they had no hot water,” says Terje Gilje, of Farrar & Co, an estate agents in Chelsea. “It turned out that the previous owners had taken the hot water cylinder with them.”
His colleague, James Rawes, arrived at his new home in Woking to find the doorbell missing. “In its place was note scribbled by the previous owners saying they had taken it because it was of sentimental value. You might have understood if it had it been an antique, but it was a bog-standard, ï¿¡2.50 doorbell fitted by the developers just three years before.”
When homeowners in Chelsea come to negotiate the sale of their properties, they can cope with the fact that they might have to drop the price by ï¿¡100,000, says Andrew Scott, of the agents Lane Fox. Yet when it comes to the creaking old tumble dryer in the utility room, they will fight it out to the last - even at the risk of their sale.
“In one case, I nearly lost the sale of a ï¿¡2.9 million property over a washing machine and tumble dryer,” he says.
“The vendor insisted on taking them, but the buyer wouldn’t complete unless the two machines stayed. In the end, we, the agents, bought the machines from the vendor and gave them to the buyer - it was the only way we could save the sale.
“Often people will take curtains which will be of no use in their new home; it just makes them feel better to have removed everything of worth from the house.
“The curtains end up in a box in the attic of their new home. There is a shop in Chelsea called the Curtain Exchange founded on the meanness of people who take their curtains with them when they move.”
In theory, there should never be any dispute over what is or what is not included in the sale. The Law Society issues a standard form to be filled in by anybody selling a property.
It lists 100 or so common items found in a house such as lamp shades, curtain poles and lavatory roll holders, and asks the vendor to tick whether or not they are installed and, if so, whether the vendors intend the items to be included in the sale.
The form becomes part of the sales contract, and vendors can be sued if they contravene it by taking something they said they would leave.
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