The two-hour legal nightmare between giving back the keys to our flat near London's St Katherine Dock and getting the keys to the new flat near Smithfield was the most stressful moment in my life.

Never move on a Friday. Everyone else does. This was a Friday afternoon in May 1999. Our furniture was sitting in a van in the cul-de-sac next to St Bartholomew the Great. I was in my solicitor’s office, scaring the daylights out of the poor young woman charged with the conveyance. Think three-year-old having a tantrum. It seemed our money had not arrived in the vendor’s bank account. How electrons carrying the money at the speed of light get stuck is a mystery. But they do.

The seller’s kind agent agreed to give us the keys at 4pm, seven minutes before the money finally landed at 4.07pm. There was no hot water to bathe off the sweat, the boiler wasn’t working. Again, kindly agent to the rescue. He let us into a still-empty unit with a working boiler and plenty of hot water. End of stressful day? No. Have you ever tried to re-assemble an IKEA bed? It can take a while. Eventually we lay back, exhausted both mentally and physically. But we were so strung out it was impossible to sleep. Towards dawn we repaired to a 24-hour greasy spoon close to the meat market and wolfed down a full English breakfast, then slept.

Why are variations on this tale still so common, 17 years further into the age of instant communications? In 1999 the then Master of the Rolls, Lord Woolf, told Estates Gazette (where I was editor) that he’d once been gazumped, and how he’d love to change to the ‘binding offer’ system, used in most of the rest of the world. He became Lord Chief Justice shortly after. Lord Woolf was never able to grant his own wish.

There is a very happy ending to this tale of strife. The flat is wonderful and the value has risen by 350 per cent. Will we sell and buy another? Never. The fuss would be too much. And of course what you learn after 17 years of reporting on the property sector is this: buy and never sell.

Peter Bill, former editor of Estates Gazette and author of Planet Property

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