I bought a 2 bedroom flat in Aberdeenshire in March 2015. It was exciting, I was 22 and I thought I was very cool to own my own home. It was at the peak of Aberdeen’s economic boom, a sellers market where every property would be on the market for 4 days, viewings would be done in large groups and the sealed ‘offers over’ bidding system meant you needed about £130k before you got a small 1 bed flat in the city.
That’s what I wanted, actually, having friends and a social life in Aberdeen was important to me, but my £21k salary didn’t quite stretch to that, it would probably get something for £105k.
I didn’t like renting, I felt I was missing out and throwing away my precious salary, I had convinced myself that buying is always the right thing to do.
So I started seeing what was outside the city, figuring that not only do I enjoy driving more than the average person, but my shift job gave me an advantage of never needing to sit in traffic.
I decided a 35 minute commute was perfectly reasonable and I found that that would allow me to get a 2 bedroom flat in one of the Aberdeenshire villages. This meant I could even *rent out the other room* and I’d be financially the smartest gentleman to have ever lived.
So I went to view ‘3 Thoms Buildings’ in Gourdon. A funny little first floor maisonette built in 1890, with a spiral staircase and two tiny bedrooms upstairs.
It wasn’t a flat! It had a spare room! It has a spiral staircase! It was only £90k 😍 All I had to do was tolerate the enjoyable and frankly beautiful 35 minute commute. SOLD.
What happened over the following 6 months? I wasn’t paying that much attention but apparently there was an oil crisis, Aberdeen’s bubble had burst. People spilled out of the city and the property market started to tank.
I decided I was done with Aberdeen by the end of 2016, packed my bags for the Netherlands and figured I’d put my house for sale and quickly get back what I’d paid for it. I even rented it to my incoming Portuguese colleague who needed a place to live in the area. I reckoned that would buy me all the time in the world to sell it.
I got about 3 viewings over 6 months. No one was interested.
Meanwhile in the Netherlands I started renting and it was crystal clear to me that I’d never be able to get a mortgage or buy a Dutch house while I own this thing in Scotland, I didn’t even check or try. Plus the houses were expensive as hell and looked boring and I didn’t have any savings for a deposit and I had no Dutch credit history. Nah, ‘I’ll at least wait until Gourdon is sold’.
Weirdly ‘not’ buying a house in NL was probably the worst decision, even worse than buying Gourdon itself.
Buying property in the Netherlands turns out to be easy, you don’t need a deposit or a credit score, you just need a permanent job contract, and I had one from day one. The amount I would’ve gained would’ve eclipsed the losses from Gourdon.
Gourdon became a liability, a burden. Over the 9 years that followed I became an official landlord, I tried management companies, managed it myself. Got to know all the local contractors and essentially managed it as every year its value dropped lower and lower. From £90k to a £70k home report value. Which really meant if you *want to sell it* you have to accept under £60k.
I would visit at least once a year, kidding myself that I could make improvements on my own. I felt a personal responsibility for every hole in the crumbling walls, for the toilet seat, for how the key would be stiff in the front door. Everything felt like it was about to need replacing. And I replaced a lot of stuff, I got new windows. I wanted to be a good landlord, my Dad laughed at me for spending too much on the house.
Mentally I was conflicted, was spending money on Gourdon ‘investing’ and making it easier to sell or was it throwing it away. I only did what was minimally necessary or fixed what was broken but still managed to spend probably £20k over the 9 years in small things here and medium things there.
I would lie in bed at night staring at the ceiling in Netherlands thinking about the ceiling in the bedroom in Gourdon. I would check the forecast on winter nights wondering if the wind and rain might do some damage tonight in Gourdon.
Ultimately the mental torture came from knowing I couldn’t ’just sell it’, the wise advice any older person would give me when I told them about my situation.
I couldn’t sell it because of the negative equity, I bought it was a 10% deposit, meaning the mortgage started out at £81k and this had chipped away down to £58k by 2026.
The pain of owning that flat wasn’t the trouble of being a landlord. That itself is annoying, but it was feeling cornered and stuck in a situation I didn’t choose where (dramatic but true) it gave a silver lining to death. Like death would make it someone else’s problem, and it being someone else’s problem was the sweet nectar i’d been increasingly craving.
In 2024 I listed the flat with Portolio, who specialise in selling tenanted property, meaning I could market the house for sale it without evicting my tenant.
This turned out to be essential, as after 18 months and about 7-8 viewings, plenty of snarky and cruel feedback, I finally found a buyer.
Last week I sold it to a young investor, for £47.5k, which meant I had to bail myself out by £15k after all my fees.
I’m delighted, over the moon. I sold it on the day of my work’s new year party. So I took the opportunity to bore all my colleagues with my happy story.
What’s the lesson then?
“Your choices are half chance and so are everybody else’s.” – Baz Luhrmann Everybody’s free to wear sunscreen
The phrase ‘Everyone is a genius in a bull market.’ applies everywhere you look.
People don’t acknowledge the part that luck and headwinds play in their success.
The inverse is true; you struggle not to blame yourself for everything in a bear market. When things are on a downturn, the regrets pile up.
Goodbye Gourdon, goodbye Aberdeen. 9 years overdue but all the sweeter for it.
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