Could a handwritten letter help you buy a home or convince you to sell one?

We hadn’t planned to go house hunting in Wiltshire. My husband and I were looking to move from our small flat in Shepherd’s Bush to a house with a garden nearby. Everything we looked at had been woefully wrong: too expensive, too dark, too small. We wondered if it was normal to feel so daunted about buying a house.

It was September and we had taken our young children to stay with my in-laws in rural south-west Wiltshire, where my husband grew up. We sat in the garden in the autumn light, talking about our house-hunting woes. Swallows were flying from the eaves, I could hear a blackbird; and my husband was joking, maybe we should just move to Wiltshire? I looked at him. Actually, maybe Should?

That aVscekernoon I Googled a local realtor. He said there was a house that was coming back on the market aVsceker a sale fell through. We could look at it today if we wanted. We had no plans and the baby could nap in the car, so we figured, why not? It would be fun to pretend.

We followed the map through rolling valleys. It was the end of a hot summer and it began to rain. The fields of burnt ochre gleamed. A row of copper beech trees stood guard as we turned onto a dead-end road. We took it slowly, over the potholes, and stopped on the side of the road outside an old stone cottage with a red-tiled roof and two pear trees growing espaliered out front. It was raining hard and we unbuckled the children and carried them, covered by our coats, up a path of broken cobblestones to the front door. The estate agent was waiting for us, a country gentleman in corduroy and a waistcoat.

I had a strange feeling that made me hold my breath slightly as he turned the key in the door. Had I been there before? It felt familiar, resonant, somehow already known to me.

We looked around the cottage, opening loose-hinged cupboards and peering cautiously behind doors. It smelled musty and abandoned, each room containing part of a half-dismantled existence. There was a strong sense of a life once lived vigorously but now gone; the carpets torn to shreds, greasy handprints on the stairs, ghostly frames on the walls where the pictures had hung. The estate agent told us brusquely that the elderly owner, Barbara, had already moved to a bungalow in a nearby village.

We were both silent on the drive back to my in-laws, neither of us ready to say what we were feeling. My mother-in-law, always alert to such things, could read my expression as we got out of the car.

“Oh dear,” she said. “It was That good?” Yes. It was.

I called the realtor and could imagine him frowning when I told him how much we could offer. There were plenty of others who would offer much more, he said. It would probably go to the highest and last offers and we were unlikely to succeed.

I lay in bed thinking of the dark, welcoming woods that surrounded the cottage, a dense patchwork of green; I thought of the great pine tree in the garden, watching protectively over the house. I thought of the birds nesting in the eaves, of the silent bats on the roof, and of the view from the kitchen window, of the intersecting curves of field, hedge, and sky. I felt a pang of longing.

How could I have made it mine without a bottomless pit of money?

And then it occurred to me. I could write a letter. I carefully chose the card for Barbara: an Eric Ravilious landscape of Wiltshire, green limestone hills, country lanes, farmland and big rolling clouds. I wrote with a fountain pen and told her about us and why she should choose me.

I wrote the letter of my life and sealed our destiny in an envelope.

Barbara told the estate agent she would like to meet me. I put the baby in the car seat and drove along the A303 one November morning. I brought her some of my mother’s homemade crab apple jelly and we sat in Barbara’s kitchen, surrounded by life in a box, talking about the life she had lived there and the life I would live.

That day Barbara gave me a book, The Rose Expertfrom 1964, by DG Hessayon, with handwritten notes inside about what to do with his roses, when to cut them, and how. On the title page was his name, written in a curly hand. He had crossed it out and written my name underneath.

What is so powerful about handwritten letters? I am not the first person to write a letter in an attempt to convince someone to sell them their house, because it oVsceken works.

“It won’t work for every seller,” says Charlie Stone, director of country house sales at Rural View estate agents. “But for those clients who are feeling emotional about selling their home, who may have lived in it for a long time, who are downsizing or are finding the idea of ​​moving difficult, they want to feel that the new owner has fallen in love with their home. They want Pleases who are they selling to.”

Jenna Travers, an independent property search agent, has found personal letters to be transformative. “Letter writing is not a lost art,” she says. “A handwritten letter can be useful in giving a seller a sense of who they are selling to and I encourage all my clients to do this. Just last week a seller agreed to sell £200,000 less than the asking price to a client who had written to them. In the letter they explained that they were local to the area, that their children would grow up in the village, that it would continue to be a family home. That was important to the seller.”

There’s some interesting psychology to all this, says Justin Marking, chief executive of Savills. “Some sellers like the idea of ​​selling to younger versions of themselves,” he says. Many people selling long-time family homes especially appreciate that sense of sweet continuity. “If you write in your letter that you’re keeping their beloved old gardener, that could be the tipping point.”

“Selling a home can feel like a huge loss,” says clinical psychologist Sophie Mort, author of (Un)blocked (Gallery UK, £10.99) “Selling to someone who looks like you when you were younger can symbolise the passing on of a legacy, and by projecting your memories onto that person, you can relive those happy times.”

Letters are particularly effective at conveying an emotional message and creating a human connection, and they have the ability to transcend the purely financial issues of buying a home. “Letters convey authenticity and sincerity,” says Mort, “which fosters deeper connections than digital communications, making the homeowner feel like they are truly Know the buyer”.

Joan DiFuria, a psychologist at the Money, Meaning & Choices Institute, agrees. “The power of a handwritten letter is its ability to evoke strong emotions; it’s tangible and can be kept and revisited. A letter makes the recipient feel special and appreciated because it shows that the sender truly cares.”

For the letter writer, the process of writing a love letter to a house can also be helpful, DiFuria says. “Writing a letter can be emotionally cathartic as a way to process thoughts and feelings and gain clarity,” she says. “It can even help the writer really follow through on those goals of how they want to live.”

The letter that Georgie Everett, a teacher from Hampshire, wrote to the owners of the house she coveted was not an easy one to write, because it was so personal. “I tried and wrote the honest, honest truth,” she says. “I wrote that I had grown up on a farm nearby and that since the early deaths of both my parents, I had felt a strong pull to my roots. I longed to return to this part of the world and to give my children the childhood I had had.” Not surprisingly, they sold her the house.

For a buyer, writing a personal letter can also be a way to regain a sense of control in what can be a disempowering and brutally transactional process, and when relying on real estate agents has been fruitless. If you don’t ask, you don’t get, and really, what do you have to lose?

AVsceker being outbid three times for houses that had gone to the highest and final offers, Kate Willcocks, a psychologist, took matters into her own hands, wrote a letter and handed out flyers on three entire streets in the Bristol area where she was looking to buy, 250 houses in all. “That evening I got a call from Tony at Number 11,” she says. “He said he was on his way out the door to the estate agent when my flyer came in the letterbox.” Fate or luck, it worked. She bought Tony’s house in a private sale.

It’s been ten years since I wrote the letter that changed the course of my life. We painted over the heights of Barbara’s children and grandchildren on the kitchen wall, and now the names of my sons are written there, at intervals, to tell the story of our decade here.

My children were babies, then toddlers, then kids with muddy knees, and now they’re starting secondary school. They bathed in the big sink, rode their bikes up and down the alley, and climbed up to the treehouse that Barbara’s nephew built.

I cut back the pear trees drastically each winter, as she had told me; I cared for her roses and planted more. When we made small changes to the house over the years, I always thought of her and hoped she would approve. In that letter I wrote her, I promised her that I would be a careful guardian of her beloved home. I told her that I would love it and live a full, rich, happy life in it, and so I have. It was a letter from the heart, and I meant every word.

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