A Crying Need

Being in the writing business, I look around me to see if I can find a trade, profession or enterprise that might benefit from my attentions in the literary department.

And I find there is one particular area that cries out for help in this respect.

I refer to the business that is known as Real Estate in America and as Estate Agents in Britain. Neither title is especially appropriate. Real is defined as not imaginary and how one can apply that to the descriptions of the properties on offer, beats me, and estate is a large house with extensive grounds according to the Oxford English Dictionary. A semi-detached in Surbiton hardly seems to qualify. The French, more realistically I feel, refer to them as Immobilières.

But it’s the language they use to peddle their dubious wares that upsets me. The least they could do would be to provide a glossary to enable the unwary to decipher the true meaning. “Bijou,” for instance equals cramped, “full of character” probably means it’s in dire need of re-decoration and “conveniently located” means that it’s at the confluence of a couple of motorways, a railway junction and a branch of Tesco that operates for 24 hours a day.

How the Victorians sold their houses (I mean those of the lower and middle classes) I have no idea but Exchange and Mart, that cornucopia of multi-various offerings, contained the following in May 1868:

For Sale, A capital Family House and grounds near Chiswick, five minutes walk from a station. The house contains seven or eight bedrooms, bathroom, drawing room, 20ft. by 15ft., second ditto, dining room 17ft. by 14ft.6in., library and complete offices, two stall stables, coach house, two mans’s rooms, cow houses etc., conservatory, lawns, pleasure grounds, walled kitchen gardens, and small paddock of about one acre.

It sounds ideal for a deputy Prime Minister and I think the vendors were fully justified in referring to themselves as “Estate” agents. The paucity of their English composition was apparent, however, and this has continued until the present day – it’s just that the estates have become compressed into “delightful compact linked residence, full of charm,” etc. In other words “it’s a horrid, semi-detached without a scrap of character, just like the one next door.”

A friend of mine once bought one – he named it “Symla” – not because he had any thoughts of India. It was just symla to the one next door.

William Randolph Hearst, the megalomaniac newspaper proprietor and also owner of Marion Davies, once tried to buy a castle in Britain. His telegram read:

“Want buy castle in England. Please find which ones available.” Words were, of course, at a premium in telegrams, even for someone as wealthy as he.

His agent in England went to look at Leeds Castle:

“Needs expenditure large sum to make it habitable not a bath in place only lighting by oil lamps servants quarters down dungeons (as though Hearst would have cared!) and in steep battlemented towers stop could be made fit with expenditure of four thousand.”

He finally bought St. Donat’s in Wales as it had plumbing, and proceeded to fill it with bits and pieces from all over Britain, demolishing ancient monuments as necessary and provoking outrage from the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Xanadu, in Welle’s Citizen Kane, was modelled on his San Simeon in California and gives a good idea as to his taste, which was execrable, apart from Miss Marion Davies.

Some years ago there was an estate agent in London whose advertisements, to borrow a phrase from P.G.Wodehouse, stood out like jewels in a pile of coke. Roy Brooks sold houses by the simple expedient of describing just how unbelievably awful the property was. Intrigued, people would go along to view the monstrosity – and, amazed to find that it was not half as bad as it was painted (or unpainted, as the case may be), would buy it. It was an outstanding exercise in manipulation of the foibles of human nature – but none seemed to have followed his lead.

And thus I find it difficult to believe that practitioners of the black art of selling property, will, unless they change their ways, ever find themselves a seat in Heaven. And it’s not only that they are untruthful and deceptive on a daily basis, it’s just that they’re so boringly obvious about it.

So if there are any latter day Roy Brooks out there, I’m available. And then, maybe, they’ll stand a chance of getting to Heaven.