Trading places

The past two days have been interesting. I warn you now that this is going to be difficult to follow so you might want to take notes. Or you can give up hope now and just enjoy the brilliant selection of names on offer. Ball’s in your court.

My property search began with Jeff. Jeff turned out to be fairly disinterested in helping me to find a place (I guess I should have feared the worst when he first arranged to meet me in McDonald’s) so he was officially discarded on Tuesday. The post-Jeff era began at pace with calls to Danny, Olivia, James, Jimmy, Caroline (Tong, not Brill), Dennis, Margaret, Camille, Raymond, Priscilla and - my personal favourite - Wilfred. I also encountered someone called Chua Pooh but I'm not even going to go there. Four apartments and one shoebox later, Margaret had emerged as the leader of the pack. Yesterday morning she showed us a nice little pad on the ninth floor of Orchid Park. The rent was a little high so I asked her to negotiate again with the landlord, who would only come down so far. With a few more viewings already arranged for yesterday I fobbed her off and told her that I would make a decision in the evening.

Enter Billy, the cat amongst the proverbial pigeons (they don’t actually have pigeons in Singapore – I presume the government had them all slaughtered because they are dirty and don’t match the flowers). Billy picked us up in his car and took us to see another flat with Simon (I don’t know his surname but we can assume it wasn’t Brill), which was nice but a little expensive. Then he took us to see another one at Orchid Park. Now it gets complicated.

Billy had found this particular flat through another agent called Audrey (two property agents can collaborate in this way and split the commission between them). He had also arranged for his colleague Shannon to show us again the one we had already been shown by Margaret in the morning, as Shannon believed that she could negotiate a better rent than Margaret (apparently ang mo such as myself are the most desirable tenants). Audrey, meanwhile, had reassured Billy that the new apartment she was showing us absolutely definitely 100% wasn’t the one that we had already seen with Margaret. Turns out Audrey had got this small detail wrong. So when we arrived at Orchid Park with Billy, both Audrey and Shannon were waiting to show us the same flat, which we had already been shown by Margaret who was still waiting for an answer.

Awkward.

Not wanting to split his commission three ways, Billy told Audrey to sling her hook. Audrey didn’t take too kindly to this, blaming her secretary for the error. Billy and Shannon showed us the apartment again while Audrey sulked in her car outside and made angry phone calls. This time the landlord was there so we left Shannon to negotiate with him and went back outside with Billy. Audrey was still sitting in her car glaring at us so we went and hid by the playground while Shannon did her thing.

After a very tense hour of sitting and drinking green tea with jasmine (during which time another group viewed the same flat and we waited to see whether they would also put in an offer) Shannon called Billy to say that she had negotiated a better deal than Margaret was offering. So we emerged from the shadows and headed back up to the flat to discuss further. Audrey seemed to have got the message in the meantime and skulked off (presumably with a view to turning her secretary into dim sum).

At this point Margaret, who had been pressing me all day for an answer, texted to let me know that someone else was about to put in an offer and that I would need to move fast if I wanted to get the apartment. What she didn’t realise was that the person trying to pinch the flat from under my nose was, in fact, me. A strange but quite entertaining situation. Anyhow, I resisted the temptation to gazump myself and went with the price that Billy and Shannon had negotiated, leaving poor old Margaret empty handed. I spoke to her this morning and I can assure you that Billy is no longer on her Christmas card list.

Summary: it has been an absolute palaver (involving many people with silly English names) but I now have myself an apartment. It’s quite far from town but it’s pretty sweet.

Phew.

Oh, and I started work today. More on that another time.