A new estate agent is offering potential buyers the chance to test drive a house before investing
Try before you buy
When moving to a new home it can be nerve-wracking handing over all that money before you have even spent a night there. However, a new online platform Potential Pads is now offering interested buyers the chance to try before they buy.
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The online estate agents, Potential Pads, based in Wales will allow people to not only view potential property's but also give them a test drive. Interested buyers can stay for a night, week or even a month before choosing to put a deposit down. The service will cost you, but it is certainly cheaper than paying for a house and discovering that your neighbours are louder than the Osbournes when you move in.
Potential Pads works a little bit like AirBnB with potential buyers and sellers liaising for a convenient time for buyers to stay in the home before putting in an offer.
Before you get too excited about giving the home of your dreams a test night sleep, the website currently only has five properties for sale. The majority of which are mansions worth millions.
So unless you have a spare £22 million lying around, you might need to wait a while before houses closer to the average UK house price have a similar service.
One of the properties currently listed on the website is based near Knutsford, Cheshire and on the market for £22 million. To stay just one night on a trial will cost potential buyers £4,500.
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However, if the potential buyers choose to invest they will get 50 per cent of that fee back.
'It is a platform that helps weed out the time waters and is an incentive that speeds up the selling process of a property, all the while making money for the seller before the property has to be sold,' Lynne Maplanka, founder and director of Potential Pads told This is Money.
Would you pay to stay in a potential home before laying down a deposit down?
Rebecca Knight has been the Deputy Editor on the Ideal Home Website since 2022. She graduated with a Masters degree in magazine journalism from City, University of London in 2018, before starting her journalism career as a staff writer on women's weekly magazines. She fell into the world of homes and interiors after joining the Ideal Home website team in 2019 as a Digital Writer. In 2020 she moved into position of Homes News Editor working across Homes & Gardens, LivingEtc, Real Homes, Gardeningetc and Ideal Home covering everything from the latest viral cleaning hack to the next big interior trend.
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