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It has been a bad week for buying houses with an ocean view. Spare a thought for Londoner Sue Diamond who bought Ridgemont House, a six bedroom home in Torquay at auction for £154,000. Six days later most of the garden crashed onto the beach below, leaving the house sitting just 50ft from the edge of the 300ft cliff. It’s safe to say that this might affect the value of the property and the chances of getting planning permission to build on the land.

At Decision Homebuyers we’ve seen our share of disastrous houses, houses that they said could never be sold. In 2007 we were contacted by a couple whose Barnsley home was in a near state of collapse after the foundations were damaged by heavy flooding and rot. The house was sagging and made worrying creaking noises. It was uninhabitable, unsellable and their insurance wasn’t going to cover all of the costs of putting things right. Fortunately they contacted Decision Homebuyers and we were able to make them a realistic cash offer for their property that quickly allowed them to move to a better place. And we were able to sell their old house on to a property developer who carried out extensive renovations and sold the property to a family who needed a home.

According to the charity The Empty Homes Agency, there are currently 762,000 empty homes in England and around half of them have been unoccupied for more than a year. Many of these houses are in bad repair, ranging from poor décor to their being on the point of collapse. But at a time when there is an acute housing shortage, this is a scandal.

We at Decision Homebuyers pride ourselves that we could make a cash offer on any property – even if it was in danger of falling off the edge of a cliff – and find a buyer willing to take on the responsibility of making it habitable again.

“Some homeowners and landlords are in a state of denial about their property. Unable to sell or rent them and unable to afford the cost of renovation, they sometimes allow them to stand empty,“ says Decision Homebuyers’s Amanda Hoyles. “This is a waste for everyone concerned: they could get immediate cash and allow someone else to take over and undertake repairs. Empty houses aren’t good for neighbourhoods. And at a time when there’s an acute shortage of affordable housing, they aren’t good for the country.”

Homeowners in the UK are having problems selling their property because of supernatural manifestations. But for one UK property investor with an exorcist as well as a surveyor on its payroll, this is not a problem…

Time was that haunted houses would stand abandoned for years, owners would have problems selling because of the midnight wails of headless Lords and white ladies walking the corridors. But thanks to the success of shows like Living TV’s Most Haunted and Derek Acorah’s Ghost Towns, there is a growing market of house buyers who would like to own their own haunted house.

According to a 2005 survey by the Portman Building Society (now part of Nationwide), one third  of those questioned said that they had lived in a house that they believed was haunted. That’s an awful lot of ghost houses out there.

And many sellers have found that they have been unable to sell because of a “presence” in their home.

“We moved into a terraced house in Charlton, South London in 1980,” says Decision Homebuyers client Mrs B, now of Taunton in Cornwall. “Almost from the day that we moved in we would hear somebody moving around in the loft early in the morning. We’d smell pipe tobacco really strongly though my husband and I were both non smokers as were the neighbours on either side. At night when we were sitting watching TV you could almost sense that there was somebody else in the room with us.

“We asked around and there had apparently been an  man who used to live in the house who killed himself after his son was killed in the Korean War. He was a pipe smoker according to neighbours.

“It never really bothered us until a few years ago when we decided to sell. Suddenly it was as if we had angered the ghost. Things would fall off shelves. The power would fail. Light bulbs would suddenly get bright then dim then they would pop.
“We just couldn’t sell the place. One woman was very interested but when she came to look around she said that the place suddenly grew extremely cold and she could smell something really foul. Another buyer was a doctor and he said that he couldn’t but the house because he could feel something malicious here.”

Decision Homebuyers bought Mr and Mrs B’s house after it had been on the books of a local estate agents for a year. The couple were desperate to sell and free up equity to put down a deposit on their retirement dream home in the west country.

“After buying the property, we had one buyer lined up who wanted to live in a haunted house,” says Decision Homebuyers MD Celia Steward. “Unfortunately after visiting the property she was very disturbed by a presence that she sensed didn’t want her there. Eventually we were able to call upon the services of an exorcist, a chap called Joe who had been an Anglican priest and had studied with a Hopi shaman. He performed a cleansing ritual that seemed to pacify whatever was in the house. Our client bought the house and lives there very happily to this day.”

We at independent property company Decision Homebuyers understand the plight of owners who have been unable to sell their homes because it is haunted. That’s why we are actively looking for haunted houses throughout Britain because we always have lots of buyers. And we can also call on the services of psychic investigators, ‘ghost whisperers’ and exorcists if it’s a ghost that won’t behave.

People selling their homes are still setting unrealistically high asking prices according to the Halifax. And estate agents and sellers are over pricing homes, often just to win the instruction.

“Sellers are often misled by the price that other nearby properties have sold for, “ says London independent estate agent and property developer Martin Boyle. “But there are a lot of estate agents that are just desperate to have every property on their books that they can get. If it does sell they get a bigger commission. But it’s often no skin off their noses if they have it on their books for months without any interest being shown.”

Even at the height of the property boom around 2002 there were people who simply could not sell their houses. Thjere were many reasons for this, but the most common seems to be that there was a tendency on the part of estate agents to over-value property, sometimes to sign up clients, but often at the insistence of sellers.

“It’s natural that a seller will want to get everything that they can possibly get for their homes,” says Decision Homebuyers’s Amanda Hoyles. “But often they end up hurting themeselves financially. Keeping a property on an estate agents books for months and months at a price that is too high can damage its chances of ever selling at all. Meanwhile the owners continue bto run up the costs of mortgage, upkeep and maintainance.”

“We had our home on the market for close to £300,000. It was on the books of two local estate agents. One of them valued it at £305,000, the other at £298,000. We had very few viewings and eventually after nearly a year we took it off the market. We were advised to spend a lot of money on renovations before putting it up for sale again. Eventually we just had to get real because we were under a lot of pressure to sell,” says Mrs Parker of Cheltenham, a Decision Homebuyers client. “It went for less than it had been valued at but when you factored a lot of other costs into the equation, it was the right thing to do. We got an offer and a guaranteed sale without risking more money on renovations that may or may not have helped the place to sell. That, in the end, was more important than trying to get an unrealistically high sale price.”

Decision Homebuyers can buy any property in any condition throughout the UK regardless of the state of the market.

Around 600,000 people are trapped in their property because they can’t sell it for the price they want. And according to the same research, the people most likely to be hit are people over 55 who may already have paid off most or all of their mortgage but can’t find a buyer. The poll was carried out by Unbiased.co.uk, the professional advice website, and shows a massive increase in the number of people trapped in their properties over the past five years. Despite reports of rising property prices, the market remains nervous.

“We have lived in our home for nearly 30 years,” says Mrs J of Hounslow. “A few years ago we decided to relocate to Spain to retire. We knew that house prices were falling and put our house on the market at what we thought was a realistic price. In the past two years we’ve dropped the price twice. We’ve made it clear that we are open to offers. One sale fell through when the buyer couldn’t get a mortgage. Another fell through when the buyer was unexpectedly made redundant before we had exchanged. We feel that our home is a good investment but people seem to be over cautious.”

Decision Homebuyers was able to help Mrs J and her husband to sell their house, free up the equity and make the move to Malaga that they had planned.

“The current climate means that people who might otherwise have moved up the property ladder are staying put and adopting a wait-and-see stance,” says Decision Homebuyers’s Amanda Hoyles. “It means that more and more people are stuck where they are and can’t move on. It’s not a great situation to be in, but at least it is one where we can be of help.”

For nearly eight years Decision Homebuyers has been buying properties for cash, allowing owners to free up their equity quickly and move on.

“We were amazed that the sale went through so fast, “ says Mrs J. “It was around a month from the first phone call to the actual sale, when the money appeared in our bank account. And we were able to stay an extra week while everything was packed and shipped over to our new home in Malaga. It wasn’t what we had planned but the offer was fair and Decision Homebuyers paid all the legal fees. What’s more we didn’t have another English winter eating up our money on heating bills.”