Wet your pants at a viewing? Come on we’ve all done it! Here’s the surveyor who found a nifty way around the problem
Sink or swim
Resi agents are under tremendous pressure to ensure everything is perfect before a mega-mansion viewing. One agent recently took extra precautions and arrived at a grand Surrey property early, before promptly slipping on the marble tiling around the swimming pool and falling in head-first – complete with suit, shoes, wallet and iPhone 6. With minutes to spare, he swapped his soggy suit for a pair of Vilbrequin trunks he found in the pool house and threw a towel over his shoulder, explaining/pretending to his clients that this was in fact his house and those pesky agents had got the dates wrong but he would be delighted to show them around himself. Diary trusts the rest of the viewing went… yes, we’re doing it… swimmingly.
Quack, quack, oops
While putting together this week’s high-tech EG London, Diary landed on the contact page of image recognition specialist Blippar. The firm’s boffins are responsible for the augmented reality wizardry that animates, among other things, the EG supplement this week. And like all responsible webcos, it guards its contact form from spambots with CAPTCHA technology, which distinguishes humans from spambots. Sounds simple enough. What could go wrong? Well, check out the screengrab below. Oops.
Putting pen to paper
Building surveyors are not known for their flamboyant penmanship, but there is clearly one lonely soul out there who fancies himself as a writer. A CBRE agent who bought a new home earlier this year was surprised to discover some unusual passages in his building survey while doing his due diligence. Assuming no one actually bothers to read such documents, the author of the survey had decided to include a few passages from a children’s story before tailing off into nothingness. When the purchaser raised the issue with the surveyor’s employer, he was told the report had been written on the surveyor’s last day in the job. Perhaps he had quit to pursue a career as an author?
London Cells out
Fans of Soft Cell – and you’d be mad not to be, in Diary’s book – will recall the band’s ode to impoverished, despairing London living in the 1980s, Bedsitter. “Dancing, laughing, drinking, loving; And now I’m all alone in bedsit land; My only home,” ran the lyrics, over a maudlin synth backing. Well, singer Marc Almond updated the lyrics this week on Twitter. “Cities are amorphous and are ever changing,” he tweeted, “but £700,000 for a small flat in Elephant & Castle is ridiculous.” And his rewrite? Well it goes like this: “And now I’m all alone in luxury development studio flat land; my only home.”
Tech junkies pay the price
Only last week we were reporting back from the BCO Conference in Chicago that under-35s are starting to feel the need for digital detoxes, which is hardly surprising given that new research reveals that taking away some people’s mobile phones has a similar effect to taking away a drug addict’s cocaine. As a case in point, Diary this week learned about the plight of one young lady at a property recruitment company and her smashed mobile phone screen. While the tech addict in question was offered a full repair for £30 – and an overnight service, no less – she promptly rejected it in favour of spending £300 on the same job at Bluewater shopping centre in Kent. Why? Because they could do it on the spot. A £270 premium to keep her next fix firmly within her sights? Money well spent…
Seeing red
Is there a new Friday “uniform” breaking through in Birmingham property circles? Tweed blazer? Check. Shirt (any colour)? check. And… red trousers? Double check. In a sea of blue, black and grey suits at a recent event in Birmingham, three chaps stood out for their extrovert choice of daywear. Those creating a stir were CBRE colleagues Ed Gamble and Theo Holmes (who both even wore the same green-hued tweed blazer) and BNP Paribas Real Estate’s Simon Robinson. One of the red-trouser brigade was even offered money to take off said FRTs (Diary will leave readers to work out the acronym). Red-trouser-wearing property types may want to adopt John Finnemore’s little ditty as their new anthem. Repeat that chorus after me: “We’re wearing red trousers and we’re out on the lash. We’ve all got red trousers and we’ve plenty of cash.”
