Blogger’s Note: I apologise to those of my readers who also follow another blog of a mutual friend who has, in recent weeks, been giving a blow-by-blow account of his middle-heavyweight bout with the Israel real estate market. I am not setting up in competition, but this week’s topic reflects how certain issues seem to be dominating my waking life at the moment.
It is now over two months since I casually dropped into the conversation that Bernice and I had taken the decision to move to Zichron Yaakov to be close to Esther and family, and one or two of you have been tentatively inquiring how our plans are going. So I thought this week I would bring you up to date.
There are two ways of doing this. The first is a one-sentence summary, which is, as it happens, fairly easy.
No progress has been made.
The second is rather more fraught, and complex, and, I hope, interesting, and will bring me closer to my magic 1500-word target, so why don’t I throw that in as a freebie?
Moving is, like everything in life, a process. It involves two distinct sub-processes: selling and buying. Or should that be buying and selling? Or perhaps we should be aiming for buyselling as a complex process that occupies a single moment in time.
We moved to our current home in Maale Adumim in the autumn of 1996, which the calendar tells me will imminently be 28 years ago. The fact that, for Bernice and myself, it seems like the day before yesterday apparently counts for nothing. However, the fact that it is so long ago means that I can no longer actually remember the emotions I assume I experienced throughout what is commonly described as a domestic experience more traumatic than any other except divorce. What I find myself asking every day is: Supposing we find the home we are looking for? How can we commit to buying before we have signed a contract to sell our home? At the same time, how can we accept an offer for our home before we have found our next home? It all seems very daunting.
As the spoiler a couple of paragraphs back already hinted, we are managing to live with this conundrum by, as of yet, failing to find either a prospective buyer or a prospective new home. Bernice and I have a couple of theories as to why this is.
Regarding our own home, the price we are asking reflects to some extent, and quite legitimately, the money we have invested in our three renovations over the years. As far as we are concerned, we have now brought the house to the point where we feel we have done everything that we need and want to do. However, Bernice’s theory, which seems to be backed up by what we see whenever a new family moves into a house in the area, is that Israelis don’t care what state a home is in, when they buy it they want, they need, to stamp their personality on it immediately: in other words, to gut it.
So, we have had viewers come in and discuss moving the front door a metre and half to one side (thereby gaining nothing, as far as I can see). Our estate agent (realtor) points out to prospective buyers that they can easily turn our snug (the extension back room that leads into the backyard) into a master bedroom and the adjacent utility room into an ensuite bathroom. So far, Bernice and I have resisted the temptation to scream: “But then, access to the backyard will be through the master bedroom! Unless you plan to knock an exit through the kitchen wall, and lose all of the impact of the design of the kitchen!”
In addition, Bernice is convinced that most viewers want a completely open-plan kitchen, dining and living area, whereas there is, chez nous, a load-bearing wall that partly divides the area in two.
Whatever the reason, we haven’t yet been made an offer that we can accept. However, as I (the Polyanna in this particular married situation) keep pointing out, selling a house is not a gradual process, where you make incremental gains that eventually reach a critical mass and topple into a sale. It is, rather, a light-switch situation: 19 people see the house and nobody makes an offer, then one day a couple walk in and half an hour later you have a buyer.
Which brings us to the other end of this tango for two. Until two months ago, Bernice and I had a home-buying record of which we were fiercely proud. When we got engaged, in 1971, we originally planned to live in London, where I was at college and Bernice was working. A few weeks’ research revealed that we could just about afford half a derelict house in the rundown area where my college was situated. We couldn’t actually bring ourselves to view any of these slum houses.
During this period, we spent a weekend visiting a friend in South Wales, where Bernice had spent her childhood. Out of curiosity, we looked in estate agents’ windows, and discovered that in the market town she had grown up in, we could afford to buy a semi-detached bungalow on a brand-new estate. The following weekend we travelled down again, saw three properties, and bought one.
I don’t want to ruin anyone’s day, especially anyone who is just starting out and trying to get on the property ladder, but that two-bedroom bungalow cost us ₤5800, which was the equivalent of just under ₤96,000 (NLS 470,000) today. Just to twist the knife in the wound: we were able to secure a mortgage for over 90% of the value, and were required to pay a deposit of only ₤500, about ₤8,260 or NLS 40,300 today.
Seven years later, on a whim, we saw two large houses in villages up the valley from our home, and bought one of them. This was not a sound economic move, but we spent seven happy years there before deciding to come on aliya.
After 15 months on an absorption centre in Gilo, we felt ready to buy a flat in Jerusalem., Friends from the absorption centre had recently bought in East Talpiot, and when the flat across the hall from them went on the market, they told us about it. We viewed it the same day, and bought it.
Nine years later, when we felt Esther and Micha’el really deserved separate bedrooms, and 55 square metres wasn’t enough for four people and a dog, even a small one, we started looking around Jerusalem. We didn’t actually view any properties, because we could tell from the advertisements that, within our price-range, no reasonable-sized flat was in an area we would consider living in, and no flat in an area that we would consider living in was significantly larger than our existing home.
At this time, Bernice went to a house-warming for friends who had just moved from East Talpiot to Maale Adumim. I didn’t accompany her, because I was in mourning for my late father. She came home and could not stop enthusing about the house our friends had bought…and the price they had bought for. Shortly afterwards, we viewed two houses, and bought one of them.
So, our record, until a couple of months ago, was: Viewed: 8. Bought: 4.
The last two months have, sadly, destroyed that outstanding record. We have to date viewed 9 properties, and we are not going to buy any of them. It was only yesterday that I realised why this is so. Until now, every move we have made has been to a bigger, better property. That has made us much easier to please. In addition, we have never, previously, had any pre-conditions, other than wanting to upgrade. We were not really tied in terms of location or specific requirements.
This time, we are being considerably more fussy. We want to be in Zichron Yaakov, and, ideally, within walking distance of Esther and Maayan’s new flat, which they are due to move into on 1 September. We also want to be within walking distance of an Ashkenazi shul that we will be looking to to provide us with a ready-made community (as happened so handsomely both in East Talpiot and Maale Adumim).
We also require to be no more than two floors above (or indeed, below) street level, or, alternatively, to be in a building with a shabbat lift. Zichron, we have discovered, is not packed with buildings with shabbat lifts.
We also require either a garden apartment or an apartment with a sukkah balcony. (I have been astonished to discover that there are estate agents in Israel who are not sufficiently versed in the laws of sukkah to understand what actually constitutes a sukkah balcony.)
We spent a week flirting with a 14th-floor mini-penthouse in Pardes Hanna. The 1-metre strip of the long balcony nearest the railing was not under the balcony of the penthouse on the floor above, and so we would have been able to set a long table and seat all the guests on one side, with everyone being in a kosher sukkah. However, the effect would have been less Sukkot, and more Seder night (as in da Vinci’s The Last Supper), which we eventually decided against. This was, I must say, to the great relief of almost everyone we spoke to – including family, and friends who lived for decades in Pardes Hanna – who were all convinced that we would not be able to make friends there. Indeed, just about the only person who thought the location and flat were ideal for us was the Pardes Hanna estate agent.
We are by no means certain that our family and friends are right, and we also have no unrealistic expectations of being able, at this stage in our life, to make friends anywhere as close as the friends we have in Maale Adumim. (This, of course, applies primarily to Bernice, who is the partner in this marriage principally responsible for HR. I handle things like working out whether Micha’el’s wardrobes will fit in the third bedroom, and largely leave people to her. This arrangement works for us.)
I don’t want you to think that viewing these nine properties has been a waste of time. We have a number of valuable takeaways. First is a much better understanding of the internal geography and neighbourhood variations within Zichron. This is particularly true since, these days, with Israel’s security agencies jamming GPS, Waze is liable to tell us at any moment that we are in downtown Beirut.
In addition, every place that we see that is not right makes it clearer to us what our requirements, and our priorities within those requirements, are.
Finally, if we hadn’t viewed properties this week, I wouldn’t have spotted, in one of the flats, the following box, packed ready for moving. Just one month exactly after the 30th anniversary of the release of Forrest Gump, I couldn’t not include it here.
Somewhere out there, I am sure, is an almond praline of an apartment with our name on it. Perhaps we will, at some point, bite into it, and spend happy years in Zichron with the family, liberally sprinkled with month-long excursions to the other family in Portugal. Perhaps we won’t, and we’ll continue to enjoy the home and the friends that have, by now, had all the rough edges rubbed off them, and we will make do with a weekly trip to Zichron and still have Penamacor. We happen to believe this qualifies as a win-win situation, and we really do know just how lucky we are.