What I Learnt Viewing 50+ Properties (So You Don’t Have To)

Over the course of our house hunt, my partner and I viewed over 50 properties across South East London. Flats, terraces, conversions, a new build that smelled so aggressively of paint I got a headache within four minutes, and one place that I am fairly sure was a garage with a sofa bed in it.

Some were brilliant. Some were disasters. Most were somewhere in between but described as “charming” on Rightmove regardless. Along the way, I learned things that no listing, no estate agent, and absolutely no property influencer on Instagram ever told me. The kind of lessons that only come from standing in the room, walking the street, and Googling things at midnight when you should really be asleep.

Here are the 10 biggest ones — the things I genuinely wish someone had told me before I started. Ideally over a pint, in a tone that didn’t sound like a government leaflet.

1. The photos lie (always)

I cannot stress this enough: estate agent photography is catfishing for bricks. Wide-angle lenses that make a bathroom look like a ballroom. Strategic cropping that hides the wheelie bins, the main road, and the neighbour’s questionable extension. One listing described a “spacious garden” that turned out to be a Juliet balcony. A Juliet balcony. You could stand on it, just about, if you stood sideways and didn’t breathe too enthusiastically.

My partner and I got burned on this early. We drove 40 minutes to see a “generous double bedroom” that was technically a single with aspirations. I started bringing a tape measure after that. My partner thought I was unhinged. My partner was wrong. The tape measure saved us from at least six wasted Saturdays.

The EPC usually includes total internal floor area. Check it before viewing. It is the one number the photographer cannot Photoshop.

2. Visit at different times of day

We viewed one flat on a Tuesday morning. Quiet street. Loads of natural light. Actual birdsong. We practically started naming our future children in the hallway. Then we went back on a Friday evening and discovered the road was gridlocked, the pub next door was heaving, and I could hear every word of the neighbour’s phone conversation through the wall. Every word. For the record, Darren, I think your sister is overreacting, but that’s really none of my business.

A single viewing is a first date — everyone is on their best behaviour. The Tuesday morning version of a street and the Friday night version are basically different postcodes. If you’re serious about a place, go back at least twice. Walk the area at different times. Stand outside at rush hour and just… listen.

A Viven report flags things like road proximity, licensed premises, and transport noise before you even visit. But nothing replaces standing on the pavement at 7pm on a Friday while someone parallel parks into your future hedge.

3. Check the water pressure during the viewing

Turn on the taps at every viewing. Kitchen tap, bathroom tap, shower. Run them simultaneously if possible. Flush the loo while the shower is on. You will look odd. The estate agent will look at you. Let them look. You’re the one who’ll be standing in that shower for the next five to ten years.

Also: check the boiler. How old is it? Combi or system? If the agent doesn’t know, that’s not great. If the boiler has a date sticker from 2006, budget for a replacement.

4. Look at the ceiling, not the floor

Most people walk into a room and look at the kitchen, the flooring, the bathroom tiles. This is understandable. It’s where your eyes naturally go. But the ceiling is where the truth lives.

Water stains. Cracks where the wall meets the ceiling. Anything bowing or uneven. Fresh paint that’s suspiciously shinier than the rest of the room (translation: they painted over a problem and hoped you wouldn’t look up). In one flat, my partner spotted a patch of fresh emulsion on the ceiling above the bay window. We asked about it. The agent said it was “just a cosmetic touch-up.” The surveyor later confirmed it was covering a leak from the flat above. Just a cosmetic touch-up.

Look up. Look at the corners. Look at where the walls meet the ceiling. Damp and structural problems announce themselves quietly, and usually above eye level, because sellers know most people don’t bother to look.

5. Count the plug sockets

This sounds absurd. I know. But hear me out. Older properties — pre-1980s, sometimes pre-1990s — often have far fewer sockets than you’d want. A bedroom with one double socket. A kitchen with two. A living room where you need a daisy chain of extension leads just to charge your phone and run a lamp simultaneously.

Few sockets doesn’t just mean inconvenience. It can mean old wiring. And rewiring a house is not a weekend project — it is a £5,000–£10,000 job depending on the size of the property. We viewed a beautiful Victorian terrace that had two sockets in the entire kitchen. Two. I asked when the electrics were last done. Nobody knew. We walked away. Gorgeous house. Electrics from the Cold War.

6. Open every door and cupboard

Estate agents are surprisingly good at directing your attention. “Look at this lovely feature fireplace.” “Notice the original coving.” And while you’re admiring the coving, you’re not opening the cupboard under the stairs where a small rainforest of mould has established itself.

Open everything. Every cupboard. Every closet. The airing cupboard. The meter cupboard. The utility cupboard that smells faintly of damp but the agent says is “just the cleaning products.” Look at the boiler. Look at the fuse box. Look under the kitchen sink. You are about to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on this thing. You are allowed to look in the cupboards.

In one viewing, I opened a cupboard and found a bucket positioned under a pipe with a slow drip. The agent said the owner was “aware of it.” Yes. Clearly. They’d put a bucket there. That is awareness. That is not a fix.

7. Check phone signal in every room

Nobody mentions phone signal, and it was terrible in about a third of the places we viewed. Thick Victorian walls, basement flats, random dead zones. If you work from home, this matters more than you think. Do a quick test in every room: open a browser, try to load a page. Sixty seconds. We ruled out otherwise decent properties because the signal in the bedroom was basically zero.

Broadband is equally critical. Some streets have full fibre while the next street is stuck on ADSL. A Viven report includes broadband data for the specific property, so you can check before you even book a viewing.

8. Talk to the neighbours

Feels awkward the first time. By property number 15, you won’t care. Walk around the block after the viewing. If anyone is outside, just say: “Hi, we’re looking at buying number 42. How do you find living here?” People are almost always happy to chat. One neighbour told us about a damp problem the seller hadn’t mentioned. Another told us the street floods every time it rains heavily.

Neighbours have no incentive to lie. The estate agent has every incentive to leave things out.

9. The listing description is creative fiction

I started collecting my favourite examples of estate agent language and what they actually mean. Here is a partial dictionary:

• “Compact” — small
• “Cosy” — very small
• “Bijou” — comically small
• “Deceptively spacious” — small, but the photographer used a very wide lens
• “Characterful” — old and unrenovated
• “Full of potential” — currently dreadful
• “Ideal for a developer” — uninhabitable in its current state
• “Well-loved family home” — nothing has been updated since 1994
• “Quiet location” — far from everything
• “Vibrant area” — loud
• “Benefits from transport links” — you can hear the train from the bedroom

My all-time favourite was a listing that described a property as having a “south-facing aspect.” The south-facing aspect was a window. The window faced a wall. The wall was approximately two metres away. South-facing, technically. Sunlight? Not so much.

10. Trust your gut, but verify with data

The gut reaction when you walk into a place matters. That “I could live here” feeling is real and worth listening to. But gut feelings are not data. They’re spectacularly bad at detecting subsidence risk, flood history, declining school ratings, or the planning application for a block of flats behind the garden. (Here’s a full checklist of what to check before buying.)

Treat the gut feeling as a filter, not a decision. If a place feels right, go home and check the data. If it backs up the feeling, great. If it doesn’t, move on. This is why we built Viven — to do in 30 seconds what used to take an entire evening of tab-hopping between government websites.

The bottom line

House hunting is exciting, exhausting, occasionally hilarious, and frequently demoralising. You will waste Saturdays. You will fall in love with places you can’t afford. You will learn more about Victorian plumbing than any human should reasonably know. And somewhere around viewing number 35, you will develop a twitch every time someone says the word “potential.”

But the mistakes most buyers make aren’t because they made bad decisions. It’s because they didn’t have the information. Wide-angle photos, creative listing descriptions, and pressure tactics from agents are all designed to make you act on emotion rather than evidence.

Go in with open eyes. Bring a tape measure and a checklist. Run the taps. Look at the ceiling. Talk to the neighbours. And check the data before you check the boxes. You will save yourself a lot of stress, a lot of wasted petrol, and at least one argument in an IKEA car park about whether the garden really does count as “outdoor space” or if it’s just a patio with ideas above its station.