Bag it up and ship it!

Welcome, domesticated reader, as this week we look at what it's like to buy a house here in the US. Now, that's not my way of springing a big surprise; we have no personal experience of buying houses here, and we intend to keep it that way. But it's fun to watch the craziness of the Bay Area housing market and the inevitable oddities in the process.

We live in the middle of a massive housing bubble where property prices are some of the highest on the planet. Here in Palo Alto, we're comparable price-wise with central London, and whilst we are one of the more expensive areas, two towns up in Atherton it's a whole different level of insane. How anyone ever gets to the point that they can afford to buy something here is basically beyond me, but still the demand is exceptionally high.

The high prices drive all sorts of oddities, like television advertisements for houses. Yes, in the middle of some local TV broadcast, you'll be shown a quick tour of some local estate that can be yours for the wrong side of $10 million. At this price, they're tastefully shot and decorated, but they still haven't quite worked out that getting someone who's an estate agent to present these ads maybe isn't quite the icing on the cake. And still, property quite often goes for more than the asking price here.

In fact there's a whole industry in dressing houses for sale. The reason that the interior of every house looks roughly the same in estate agents' brochures here is that they clear out the owner's furniture and bring in new stuff before they photograph the place for sale.

A sure sign that a house has been sold is when something like this happens:

Contrary to this week's witty title, this isn't a house being bagged up so our new owner can take it away: it's actually how fumigation California-style works. You see, round here there are these pesky termites, and they quite like to eat wooden houses. The Americans don't mess about in such a case: they put a tent over the house, fill it with a fairly poisonous greenhouse gas, and leave it for a couple of days. This gets rid of the termites, apparently, although not for good.

Anyway, I don't have a spare few million dollars knocking around, so we won't be buying a house here. Let's also hope that when we get back home, our tenants voluntarily leave, and we don't have to resort to Californian tactics to evict them. That's one hell of a tent...