In the same way that buying a house is like poker over here, getting a mortgage is like tennis only there are three players, all of them have different versions of the rules and the ball is your future home.

Michael is organizing the mortgage. It’s really rather large and he’s very gung ho about the whole thing. We bat approvals in principle and mortgage amounts back and forth for days on end. Game point! Then Rafael joins the game. Rafael is organising the credit report. That’s the difficult bit. We’ve moved around a lot over the last few years and don’t really appear on credit recrods. Worse, the UK government as so paranoid about secruity that mortgage companies can’t actually see your credit history. Unless you are a terrorist I assume.

On Friday we spent the morning in ad-hoc conference calls with Rafael and various UK financial institutions. “Hello, my name is Rafael and, strange as it may seem, even though I have no real way of knowing who you are if you’ll just say yes a few times to Mr Nolan, I’ll authorize him to get a squillion dollar loan”.

Then you hit the Portman building society. They won’t say “yes” unless you write to them and sign your name in purest swan blood. Which means you’re now playing tennis with a bunch of inbred yokels through the royal mail.

Then you have to get on a plane and go back to Ukraine.

We have plan b (said letter, emailed to Louise and signed in eSwan’s blood), c (Michaels plan to circumvent the UK government’s restrictions on credit agencies) and d (basic fraud) in operation. In four hours we have to get on a plane and leave them to their own devices. Wish them luck.

Advantage Portman!

Buying a house in america is a lot like playing poker. The major difference is you can’t see your opponent and you can’t do that clever flippy thing with a handful of chips.

It’s all carried out through agents. Ours is called Maureen and it goes like this:

Monday. You see a house in Noe valley. They are “taking offers” on Thursday of the same week. You decide to offer over the asking price but you put a time limit (wednesday) on your offer.

Wednesday: you see another house (which you prefer) in the Inner Mission. You worry but you never blink. The time limit on your Noe offer comes around and nothing happens. You are free to offer on the Mission house. You do so along with seven other people.

Thursday: You hear about your offer. Because Maureen is a better poker player than you, you stay in the round.

The people from Noe valley call back. Your offer was second best and they’d like you to stay sitting at their table. You say no.

The people from the Mission tell you that they liked your offer best except for it’s size. Would you like to offer more? They say the same to two other people. You have under 24 hours (until 5.30pm today) to make a counter offer. You blink. Over dinner you drink too much and decide to make the bigger offer.

One of the other three people still in the game also makes and offer and it is even bigger than your offer. Maureen secretly writes to the vendors explaining what a nice English couple you are and how you have two sweet dogs (she’s never met them and is really very good at poker).

Friday. Nothing. You spend all morning on a conference call between a mortgage agent and various financial institutes in the UK persuading them to tell the mortgage guy that you are a good credit risk despite having moved country every two years since 1980.

At lunch, the people from the Mission call back and tell you what Mr X offered*. They really like you and if you just up your offer a little they say, they’ll sell you the house. You dither. You dither again and then realise that the mortgage is already 50% more than you wanted to have so an extra 1% isn’t going to break the bank any more.

5.30 pm today. The game is about to finish. Nothing is happening. You call Maureen. She assures you it’s all OK. She has some signatures and the house is yours. She’s pretty distracted as though she’s forgotten something. You blink a lot.

The winnings.

* How very un-British.

If you followed Rog’s link in his last post, you’ll have seen that to get a rented place in San Francisco, you need a doggy resumé. I had a go at adapting the one shown for one of our dogs - guess which.

DOG RESUME
Rover

Description: Rover is a genocidal, large dog who will not hesitate to use his teeth on guests. He is a 5 year old 40kg Black Russian terrier who is immature, excitable and highly-strung. We have had Rover for five years, and he is a cherished member of our family, but we’ve still not managed to train him out of biting guests and menacing Roger’s mother. If you have any questions about our dog, please ask the last victim, now in hospital in Kiev.

Health/Grooming: Rover is neutered, which hasn’t benefited his behaviour one jot. He regularly picks up fleas, which we don’t always notice straight away. In fact, we often only notice when he starts throwing up on our landlord’s carpets. We brush Rover when there’s an R in the month - why bother when he moults regularly on all the furniture he lies on? We have him professionally groomed biannually if we can find someone with good insurance. Rover is kept up-to-date on all vaccinations (we wouldn’t want such a paragon of doggie virtues to snuff it).

Activities: We walk Rover three times a day, and go to one of the Kiev’s many off-leash areas for more vigorous exercise at least twice a week. Rover’s behaviour on and off-leash is poor. On-leash, he tugs like a traction engine to get closer to small dogs and kill them. Off-leash he menaces small children with food, chases smaller dogs, larger dogs, horses and sometimes cars. He loves the beach, and friends often beg us to leave him at home. These activities satisfy Rover’s exercise requirements, and he is calm and content relaxing indoors while we are away at work. (Sadly, this is not true of our other dog, Roveretta, who is great with people, but so nervous of being left alone that she scratches the doors down in a blind panic when we go out.)

About us: As dog owners, we always try to act responsibly. We have taken three classes on dog behavior, had a vet psychologist to visit us, and hired an ex-Ukrainian army dog teacher to beat Rover into submission, er, we mean train Rover. We always clean up after our dog, and we arrange for reliable pet care if we are going away. We are so sure Rover will be a “good tenant,” we are willing to put up an additional security deposit of $1,000,000. We are committed to responsible, caring pet ownership - if only our pets were committed to responsible people ownership in return.

References: Our current landlord has just died. Other letters of recommendation were lost in transit when we moved to Ukraine.

We would be happy to have a potential landlord meet Rover, so long as he took out personal medical insurance and wore protective clothing.

Another year, another blog.

We decided to ditch the old blog and didn’t get round to setting up its replacement until now. Hope you like it.

We’ve moved to a new blog because the readership had got pretty bored, specifically it included a lot of people at my office who don’t actually know I’m moving to the US yet. Oh yeah, that’s the reason behind all the San Francisco references. The point of this blog is to document the next stage in out journey. Our time in the snowy wastes is nearly over and we’re off to sunnier climes.