The calm before the storm?

It’s a Saturday night, and shockingly (not) I’m lounging on the sofa, with the laptop.  I’m feeling remarkably non-stressed, which is never a good sign – the universe must be brewing something!  I even had the mental capacity last night to ask Finnur out on a StarCraft II date, where he sits and does all the mouse and keyboard stuff  while I sit by and (attempt to) tell him what to do.  Often times that ends up meaning that I man ‘the map’ and pester him about upgrading his units.  But it’s still a lot of fun, and this way I don’t get tendinitis nor get the game glued into my cranium.

Speaking of brewing!  Today was a remarkable day in the history of our household: We actually brewed coffee!  Using a coffee machine!  And ground coffee beans!  Not a speck of Instant Coffee in sight!!  Yes, my mother single-handedly fixed our “sorry, no coffee made on the premises”-state by giving us a moka coffee pot for Christmas! Adda then brought some ground coffee for us today, and thus we had everything we needed to make coffee.  I won’t say that it was delicious, since I don’t really know, but our guests claimed it was much better than the instant stuff.  So dear future guests, we can now claim to be ‘proper’ hosts, with all the gear that ‘proper’ hosts need! 🙂

Finally, we’re slowly getting back to looking at the real estate market, with the intent of buying something ‘more permanent’ in the coming months.  We looked at a couple of properties last weekend, and they both had their pluses and minuses.  We didn’t fall head over heals for either of them, but then again, we’re just starting out, so it’s early days.

The most bizarre thing for me about the Icelandic real estate market is that the real estate agents do next to nothing for nobody.  Basically, the listings are all (supposedly) online. (By “supposedly” I mean that the banks now own a very large number of properties, but they’re not putting them all on the market as they become available, mostly because that would probably drive the prices down.  So it’s is ‘known’ that there are a lot of properties missing, but no way to get at them.  Which is annoying.)

Back to the real estate agents.  There are virtually no “buyer’s agents” in Iceland.  Potential buyers have to do all the leg-work themselves: looking for properties online, sending an email to the real estate agent of the seller to ask for an “information-sheet” regarding the property (these are often shoddily done, and outdated), the buyer then calls the OWNER of the property to set up a time to look at it, and the owner shows the property!!!

I will readily admit that I feel really bad about calling people up and asking them to show me into their house!  It’s all so personal somehow.  At the same time, the owners are really the only people that really know the property, so I think we get more information that way.  But it’s really bizarre somehow that ‘real estate’ people seem to get paid quite a lot of money (less than in the US though) for a) visiting the property and writing up a description/taking photos, b) emailing out “information sheets”, c) doing the paperwork at the end.