Where once were bats, now are possums.

They seemed to be eating. Don’t know what — the tree is devoid of leaves. No doubt a little later tonight they’ll be merrily running riot somewhere up in my ceiling.

The bank sent me another letter last week detailing how much they would welcome me being in debt to them by. The letter never arrived, so I rang them back and sure enough they had sent it to my old address. Whoops. Double-whoops, considering that included in the envelope were lots of fun financial statements they’d wanted to see. Thankfully whoever lives at my old address now returned it to sender.

Looked at a house on Saturday afternoon, that was rather dodgily advertised as having 3 bedrooms and a dining room. On examination of the house, this clearly wasn’t the case. When asked, the real estate agent reckoned this was because it was 2 bedrooms, plus a third which alternately could be a dining room. Uh huh. Hell, why not list it as having a study and a family room as well? All at the buyer’s option, right?

In any case, my suspicion from the advertising was correct: gorgeous house, great location, but virtually zero back yard, small and no room to extend — and of course damn expensive for what it is! The agent rang me on Monday, and tried to convince me that one could build storage space or rooms in the roof cavity. And she also quoted a previous agent I’d dealt with last year (who worked for a different company — what’s this, they exchange customer lists now?) as saying “You’d be mad not to buy it”. Well, colour me crazy, but I’m not going for it. Not that I’m sure I could afford it anyway.

The thing about real estate agents is that, like used-car salesmen, some of them live up to the cliche. You only have to look at the advertising. If there’s no pictures of the inside of the property, you can be guaranteed it’s hideous inside. If there’s pictures of nearby cafes and parks and the railway station, but none of the property itself, that means the whole thing is hideous and probably falling down, and the best feature is it’s in a good spot.

You can’t even trust what suburb/postcode they quote. My sister (who is looking from afar) asked why a house listed was in Elsternwick but the web street directory couldn’t find the street. That’s because it isn’t in Elsternwick at all, but over the border in (slightly less-desirable) Gardenvale. They’re not content with lobbying Aussie Post and the local councils to move the boundaries, they ignore them too when it suits.

All part of the game I suppose.