Taking that deep breath - buying a house

For someone familiar with the structured and disciplined process of house buying and selling in the US, Italy is a foray into an unregulated, free-for-all world where anything can happen.

To start with, there’s no such thing as a listing agent. Stated a little differently, everyone’s a listing agent, and it seems they can each advertise the property for a different price. Shopping is therefore encouraged, and you can see the multiple properties through different agents, as we did. And even though it’s the honorable thing to do to buy through the agent that showed you the property, I get the sense that it’s not required.

Commissions are similar to the US, although they’re shared by buyer and seller, and not born solely by the seller as in the US (at least where I lived).

Once you enter into the offer-contract-closing stages, there’s a formal process that’s followed, which I won’t go into here – there are plenty of web sites that cover this aspect, and we left most of it to our realtor anyway.

Not long ago, Marche was relatively unknown for property investment, particularly when compared with its neighbors to the west, Umbria and Tuscany. That’s changed in the last 5 years or so, with prices increasing year-on-year by as much as 25%. And while it’s still cheaper than its more illustrious neighbors, it’s not the bargain that it used to be.

However, with a countryside that rivals those of Umbria and Tuscany, quaint hilltop towns and rolling rural farmland, there are plenty of real estate options available, from restoring a pile of stones, to moving in to a restored apartment in an old village castle. As a result, traffic has been brisk, particularly from the UK, and renovations are in progress wherever you go, bringing with them accents (verbal, not architectural, thank heavens) from all over England. Americans are also starting to come in growing numbers.

Over the course of two trips spaced 3 months apart in 2004, 3 realtors showed us around 25 properties that ranged in price from about €65,000 to around €250,000. Most were traditional brick-and-stone farmhouses in various states of repair (or disrepair, as the case may be), with a few town homes/apartments – one in a delightful village square – and a number of more “modern” (read: not brick-and-stone) homes.

While none were in the “pile of stones” category, the degree of renovation ranged from minor to substantial. In some cases renovations would have been necessary to atone for “quirks” of design (a kindly, optimistic view), such as common thoroughfares in the house going through bedrooms. In some cases, the extent of “design creativity” was irretrievable, and would have required wholesale organ transplantation in order to revive a semblance of taste. These unfortunates, needless to say, never made it past the 10-minute minimum visit to preserve a modicum of courtesy to the person showing the house to us.

Among the houses we saw, there were one or two that I would have been happy to pursue, not least because they were immediately livable, and the destination was more important to me than the house itself. However, none passed the German muster, and it wasn’t until the last day of our second visit when we were shown a last-gasp, just-on-the-market, slightly-over-our-budget house. It met our primary criteria – good view (of the Apennine mountains just a few miles to the west), character (which we firmly believed was there in liberal quantities under the bright pink walls), and location (out in the midst of rolling farmland, just 10 minutes from pleasant Tolentino, 25 from the university town/city of Macerata, and another 15 to the ocean).

On our return to the US (October 2004), we put in an offer some 10% lower than the asking price. The seller accepted it immediately. It was done.