Owning your own home

nonsense

Bit more repeat custom in other business though. Hypothetically fucking someone over in a house purchase isn't likely to come back to bite you.

Howard is trying to sell a house tbf, so that might inform his view.

Other than they know where you live...

Hypothetically I’m also trying to buy one!

Some beautiful villages around Warfield/Binfield

Wanna buy a 1 bed house with front garden and parking in se5? Good price for you my friend, very good price.

I'd say accepting a gazumping offer is equally as shitty as last-minute lowballing.

Ultimately I'd say the process of purchasing a property is a bit fucked. You can get so far along and incur so many costs with nothing actually being confirmed and that's the real problem. If this all falls through I'll be a few grand down plus a lot of hours invested in it.

Do seller and buyer actually eyeball each other at any point? I had thought all negotiation was done via salt of the earth agents.

Yeah it's the conveyancing, surveys etc that are a fucking pita - if you're buying + selling you're probably 5k in the hole. I think you can get insurance to protect you but if you drop out (bc someones lowballed you by 20%) it would be void.

Its pretty similar to buying a business etc the costs are people's time so you can't really get away from it

M40 corridor as far as Oxford is within an hour (even by bus!). Some of the villages there are nice.

I hadn't really considered moving to the North.

Some ok places around the Weybridge area. Shame can't stretch to the other side of Reading and posh places like Pangbourne

Also why Heathrow?

I live in Denham (moved out here from shepherd's bush ~ 2 years ago). Its no more than 3o minutes from Heathrow even in the worst rushhourapocalypse type traffic central London is easily reachable by train from the village station, though trains are infquent, v.easy to drive or cycle to central as well.

There are a lot of very nice villages around here offering a range of housing from footballer style neo classical gaudy mansions to permanent canal boat moorings.

This map does not show an hour's drive from Heathrow even accounting for rush hour.

Shhhh! We don’t want all those filthy rich Londoners spilling out of their city and ruining our countryside. At least not until after I’ve bought a house!

Also why Heathrow?

Assuming that the post-C19 world resembles the pre-C19 world, I need to be at Heathrow once per week on average, on the ~6am flight and back at 8-9pm. An hours drive is around the maximum that I'd want for this, two hours would make it (more) unpleasant.

I also need to go to Reading roughly once per week (or rather just outside in the Green Park business area).

I guess my question should have been, why not near other airports, but if you've to be in Reading then of course Heathrow makes sense

Sheer number of flights, it's almost always the case that the most convenient flights are out of Heathrow. Gatwick is actually a lot easier for me, from SE23, but it doesn't work timetable wise the majority of the time.

I can't see business travel ever returning back to the levels it was at before this pandemic.

I agree that it's not likely, but it's helpful in narrowing things down somewhat, and a reduction for me might be flying twice a month rather than 4-5 times.

Or it might mean a reduction to zero and I can get a dog.

Where do you go? Have you considered one of those iPad robot things? Could probably go full articulated cyborg and VR setup at those flying rates. Green and the future we’ve been promised!

He's touching base in the far reaches of the business empyrean.