Ah yes homes.  Homes are indeed our castles.  Once we become the owner, i.e. we have a mortgage and basically this house is ours, whether the mortgage is paid up or not.  The other folk in the land used to pay rent for living in the house that someone else own and had either not needed or had acquired it through family estate.   When you have spare property, it is easier to decide when you want to rent it out or leave it funished and locked up for the odd few days a year that you might want to stay in it.   When families want to acquire another home, there are two or three ways of going about this.  firstly if buying, then visiting all the estate agents in your chosen area is best.  Tell them what you are looking for;  they will engage you in a long winded discussion about how much deposit you have and how soon you would be able to proceed.  It’s not so easy these days – for some reason the agents are unwilling to show interested parties around a property unless they are absolutely in the rock solid situation of having the full deposit and legal fees to hand and the mortgage completely secured.  I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps they don’t want to raise the vendor’s hopes.