Why buying a home is more stressful than having a baby

A new poll reveals that on a list of life events, housebuying is considered worse than even childbirth. Helen Coffey looks at the factors that align to make this process uniquely traumatic

- Helen Coffey

Buying a house in this country has something of Leo Tolstoy's famous opening line in Anna Karenina about it: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Ask people about their experience of homebuying and, though the responses you'll get will be uniformly negative, each one will be specific to that individual – uniquely awful in its own way.

For my part, within six months I had offers on three consecutive properties get accepted and fall through. Although the fourth one stuck, by the time I held those hallowed front door keys in my hand, it was nigh on eight months after I’d first agreed to buy the damn thing. It should have been an “easy” sale – I was a firsttime buyer purchasing from a literal dead woman, the definition of chain-free – but this somehow did nothing to speed up the endless path to home ownership.

I initially thought my own heinous experience was out of the ordinary – a tale so blighted by obstacles and frustrations that it was in some way “special”. I soon discovered that it was par for the course. No one, but no one, seems to get through buying or selling a house in Britain without wanting to hurl themselves into the sea. With rocks tied to their ankles.

In fact, moving house has been ranked as one of the most stressful life experiences, surpassing job interviews, dental work and even childbirth (!), according to a survey of 2,000 UK homeowners. So, why is it so inordinately terrible?