"If you had to choose between saving a banker from drowning...

... and taking a prizewinning picture of the event, what resolution should you set your camera to?" - adapted from the classic question of Journalistic Ethics.

What put this into my mind? Extract from a conversation I just had:

"Mr Vet, you're going to need to get an independent valuation on your property before we can give you a mortgage."

...

"Mr Vet? Are you there?"

"Yes, I'm still here. I'm just trying to work out, on a scale of one to ten, how angry I am right now."

"Well, it's because you paid significantly more than the current valuation..."

"I told you, we bought at auction. There were other bidders there willing to pay that much."

"It's very standard practice for banks at the moment, Mr Vet."

"What's the point? That is the market. You can't get a truer valuation than that, that's why it's called 'market value'. What kind of valuer do you think is going to be able to tell you better than the market itself?"

"Well, the valuer is independent, they're trained to estimate very closely the true market value."

...

There are some questions that you will never hear an answer to, no matter how many times or ways you persist in asking them, because the honest answer would be "solely so that we can charge you more money".

In response to my badgering, he eventually promised that the bank would pay part of the cost of the valuation. So far, so good. Now all that remains is for me to bring the rest of my cash over from the UK, to raise the amount of our deposit as necessary so that we don't have to pay any further insurance - and the bank will be a few hundred dollars out of pocket, and they'll end up making less from us than if they'd just shut up and paid up.

I bet some genius banker earned a several-thousand-dollar bonus for working out this policy, which is about to cost his bank, probably, several thousand dollars in lost profit. I really hope that person is now dying painfully somewhere, but I don't have that much faith in karma.

I'd rather be listening to Mahler

The worst thing about house hunting is how it takes away one's weekends. Not that we spend that much time actually out and about looking at the damn' things; but there's time researching online, drawing up a shortlist, scheduling, travelling and looking; then there's time discussing afterwards, trying to decide which ones deserve any sort of followup.

This (Monday) morning my phone has been ringing with agents wanting to know what I thought of their property, which to tell the truth I can barely remember. So here, for my own convenience, is my take on this weekend's crop of no-hopers:

• 3/57 Mariri Road - nice little place, good neighbourhood, but criminally overpriced. The agent was talking loudly (to a roomful of viewers) about a price possibly "in the high $500s".
  Yeah right.
  If she's been fool enough to talk like that to the vendors, they're not going to sell. Not this year, anyway.


• 11 Esperance Road: very nice - in summer. But I can't rid myself of the thought that, come winter, the huge, all-glass, single-glazed walls are going to be something of a liability.


• 31 Duke Street: ancient phone kiosk and collection of stolen roadsigns in the front garden. Two bathrooms, no bath. Ensuite with underfloor heating, but no heating in the rest of the house. In short: built by and for a man, with no noticeable input from his wife. Sorry, but sometimes stereotypes just work.


• 64 Parau St: this one I think the agent put us off by playing obnoxious music on the outside speakers. All Kiwi estate agents are obsessed with "outdoor living". Me, I like to spend time indoors. Guess I'm just a foreigner.


• 38a Symonds St: this is a lovely house. Good condition, great rooms, excellent storage, a downstairs. It suffers only from two things: too much sun in the kitchen, and greedy developer syndrome (some wanker built three houses on a lot that would've accommodated two just nicely). Taken together, these things are enough to spoil it.

Two other places we saw that we haven't completely ruled out yet - and that's even more of an intrusion on my time. But I'm not very hopeful for either of them.

House buying: third attempt

In sensible countries (read: home), when you want to make an offer for a house, you phone up the agent and tell them, and they phone the vendor and tell them, and the vendor laughs and suggests another figure, the agent calls you back, and nothing gets put in writing until you've agreed on the price.

In New Zealand, nothing will do but you must make the offer in writhing[1] and the vendor countersigns it. This complicates things not a little, because typically you and the vendor are not in the same room.

[1] genuine typo which seemed oddly appropriate.

More, the writhing must be on an appropriate legal form, which is a closely-typed ten-page document with your signatures on page 6 and various other details filled in elsewhere and initialled right up the wazoo. I understand lawyers are comfortable with documents like this, and estate agents love them because of the sense of mystery and intimidation they create, but to most of us they're just annoying.

So it was that we had two visits from an estate agent last night. Not my first choice of house guests. But the cafes were closed, and one must be civil.

It was with a mixture of embarrassment and satisfaction that I noted the spilled takeaway on the floor of the lift as I escorted her up. I don't think it had been eaten before spilling, but it was hard to be sure.

She sat in the least comfortable chair and went, in tedious detail, through the standard contract terms that "the vendors" wanted to change. Personally I don't believe the vendors gave a damn' about these things (mostly, whether five working days was a reasonable time to get a builder's report, or whether we should be allowed seven working days as I'd originally suggested), but she needed something uncontroversial to talk about before getting down to brass tacks. (Negotiating 101: make sure your wedge has a thin end.)

Then she showed us the vendor's counter-offer: $475,000, a piffling $7000 below the original asking price. (Which, the agent assured us, was an extremely reasonable price. Never had a vendor been so earnestly pressed to keep their expectations reasonable, never was a house better priced to sell. She knows some agents like to pad their prices upwards, but she could not countenance such a practice. Incidentally, had she mentioned that the market has almost completely recovered?)

I sat and thought for a long time. Then I decided: time to see if they're serious about selling. In one stroke, I increased our offer from $430k to $450k.

"What's your limit?", asked the agent. Hoping, presumably, I'd forget that her job is to squeeze as much out of me as she can. "Because if I keep running back and forth with these small changes..."

"That's not a small change," I interrupted her.

She backpedalled hastily, muttering some non-apology about the multi-million dollar deals she's apparently accustomed to making, and went off to plague sundry other people, including our vendor.

Two hours later she was back. I brought her up in the same lift, she sat in the same chair and showed us the new offer.

I couldn't find it at first. There was so much writing, crossing out and initialling on the front page of the form that the number was not easy to see. Eventually I tracked it down: $470,000.

"Forget it," I said. "I made a big concession, I was looking for a reasonable movement back from them; if they're not prepared to make that, then we're just not going to reach an agreement."

She remonstrated a little for form's sake, but I think she could see she was wasting her breath. I wondered if she'd tried to talk the vendors into making a bigger concession; if so, presumably she'll be in a better position to pressure them next time. Pretty soon we thanked each other politely for our time, and she saw herself out.

I just hope she got the same lift again on the way down.