Nobody should fly to Italy to discover in ten minutes that a house was never right.
Video first. Aeroplane second.
How it usually goes wrong. People book a week, line up eleven viewings and spend the week driving. Four were never right, two were wrong in ways photographs hide, and the good one gets thirty tired minutes on the final afternoon.
There is a better order.
One — a call, about you. Not about houses. How you want to live, village or open country, who is driving, what you will do in February. Half an hour here eliminates more wrong houses than any search filter.
Two — live video. Not the marketing film. A phone in one of our hands, walking the whole property in real time while you ask questions: what is behind that wall, is that damp, how many steps, show me the neighbour's side, open the window so I can hear the street. Unedited, and honest about the bad parts.
Three — the virtual tour. For the houses that survive step two, a full three-dimensional walkthrough you can go back into at midnight, measure inside, and show to your children before they have an opinion about Italy.
Four — the surroundings. What is around a house matters as much as the house: the approach road, what could be built next door, how exposed it is in winter, how far the bar really is on foot.
Then you fly. With three or four serious candidates instead of eleven, proper time at each, and a second visit to the front-runner before you decide anything.
One rule we keep. We will tell you on the video call when a house is not right for you, even when it is one of ours. It costs us a viewing, and it buys the only thing that matters at this distance: that you can believe what we tell you.
