The journal.

Asking prices held while volumes fell 12%. We read 140 closed files to see who is actually buying. The files say the same thing three ways: the buyers who closed paid what was asked, waited longer to do it, and walked away from anything priced for last spring. The discount did not disappear — it moved from the price to the timetable, and this piece shows where.

The eleven things our advisors check on a first walk-through — and what each one costs to put right. None of the eleven is exotic: a stucco ceiling, a staircase that has been moved, a roof vote nobody mentioned. What matters is the order they are checked in, because the third one decides whether the other eight are worth the afternoon.

The sequence from NDA to notary, and the three points where buyers usually lose weeks. Off-market is slower on paper and faster in practice: fewer people read the file, but every one of them reads all of it. We print the sequence as our notaire keeps it, with the weeks each step took on the last nine sales.

Which courtyards are quiet at eight, where the deliveries come at six, and the two buildings we would not buy in at any price. Written in the order you would walk it, from the quai end to the boulevard, with the price per metre at each corner and the one building where we would not take a mandate.

Three years of minutes, four things that matter, and the paragraph that tells you what the building will ask of you in 2027. A notaire explains what he looks for first. He reads the last page first, because that is where the money is voted, and then the works that were discussed and never voted, because that is where the next bill is.

One hour, one buyer, one home, and the whole of it. Why we do not run three viewings in an afternoon, and what we write down afterwards. If the advisor is looking at her watch, you are paying for somebody else’s appointment. The hour is the whole of what a viewing is for, and the report written that evening is the whole of what it leaves behind.

The river, the traffic, the double glazing that does not help, and the four floors where it stops mattering. With the sound readings we took at seven in the morning from three different flats in the same building — and what the quietest of them was asking.

Every sale we made in the last twelve months, the asking price, the price paid, and the days it took. The median is 2.4 % under asking, and the outliers are the interesting part. The two sales that landed furthest from asking were the two that had been on the floor longest, which is the sentence this journal keeps arriving at from different directions.

Four kinds of damp, how each one smells in August, and which of them a surveyor can settle in an afternoon. Two of the four cost nothing to put right. Two of the four cost nothing to put right, one costs a fortnight, and one is the reason a survey is commissioned before the price is agreed rather than after.

Exclusive or simple, the term, the fee and the line about who pays for the survey. A notaire reads one aloud, clause by clause, and says where owners usually stop reading. Owners usually stop reading at the fee. The clause after it — who pays for the survey, and what happens to it if the mandate ends — is the one that decides whether the file can ever be published.