How a hand-written letter yielded my dream home

Lord Sugar inspired the search for my dream property. Despite his business acumen, the Amstrad mogul failed to find a home on his preferred street in Chigwell in Essex’s “golden triangle”.

So Lord Sugar went low- tech. He penned a hand-written letter to four or five owners of houses he admired. After one Chigwell owner replied, Lord Sugar went “round like there like a rocket”, and he bought it up.

My house-hunt proved similarly frustrating. In 2018 I returned from an overseas journalism career to a rental property in Lichfield, Staffordshire, to raise three young children near to ageing parents. What came on the market for the next 18 months was dross. So I did what came naturally: whipped out my Biro and started writing.

With an imminent deadline on our tenancy agreement, I worked fast. I gazed into people’s front rooms and admired their gardens from the pavement. Four Lichfield streets delivered a long list of 50 period properties that we wanted to buy. But with a maximum budget at £450,000, Zoopla showed that half my hot list was way out of my league. No matter; the other 25 received a letter asking if they wanted to sell.

The letter’s wording was key: I wrote that I was a father of three, raised in our fair city, who had always admired their street. And that “while we are in no rush to move, we have the funds from our overseas property sale should a vendor wish to sell quickly”.

Of the 25 letters, five potential vendors wrote back. Three owners invited my wife and I over for immediate viewings without an agent.

One recipient was retired lecturer Sheila Clark. “A day or two later (my two siblings and I) also received another letter from someone asking to buy the property,” she tells me five years later. “We were amazed that people were being so proactive.”

Clark’s late parents’ century-old bungalow was a rare find. In need of work, and therefore within our budget, it had a 100ft south-facing garden, a church across the street and views over Lichfield Cathedral. In short, a fabulous family property where three children had already left happy memories.

Pricing was an issue, recalls Clark. “We knew that dad’s bungalow was not the usual run-of-the-mill property,” she explains. Three estate agents had already given wildly different valuations. “We took the middle one.”

We got lucky. After completing in November 2019, two days before our rental agreement expired, Clark’s family home became our lockdown haven. During Covid we replanted her father’s vegetable beds and reglazed his greenhouse. A massive renovation added a weaving studio for my wife, who grows dye flowers in our garden, then colours handwoven baby wraps and scarves.

As property markets tighten, and empty-nesters grow ever more reluctant to downsize, sourcing houses by post has become a regular tactic for desperate house hunters.

Eight years ago, father-to-be David Gee, a landscape designer from the Midlands, was desperate to live in a Victorian street he had admired since school. “I literally scribbled something like ‘please forgive me for being so forward’ and posted it through 12 doors on the south-facing side of the street,” recalls Gee. One replied immediately. These owners had crafted a beautiful family home “but, big surprise, they had triplets,” says Gee. “So their house was suddenly too small.”

As the vendor knew Gee had a family on the way, there was an obvious connection.

During the next five years, neighbours to the left and right, who had also received his original hand-scribbled letter, sold their houses to Gee. Obtaining three properties off-market means he can rent two out to create a rental income for retirement.

Using off- beat tactics to secure a dream home works at all levels. “We had a client who was in competition to buy a £5m house owned by an elderly lady,” says Henry Pryor, a buying agent. The client’s two little girls wrote to the elderly owner thanking her for the welcome, then hand-delivered their letters. “The seller signed through tears,” adds Pryor.

Writing letters yields a fairly low success rate: only a fifth of letters that I sent to Lichfield addresses netted a reply. Even Lord Sugar only received one reply from five. Jonathan Bramwell, a buying agent of 24 years, feels my pain; usually when he contacts a vendor directly asking if they will sell, “this approach produces a no”.

‘The letter’s wording was key: I wrote that I was a father of three, raised in our fair city, who had always admired their street’

Tristan Rutherford and his family moved into their dream home just before Covid and it became their lockdown haven