Guest Post & Giveaway: Katie Fforde talks about her research for The Perfect Match

Today I'm kicking off Katie Fforde's blog tour with a fab guest post by Katie talking about her day with an estate agent as part of her research for writing The Perfect Match which is published this Thursday.

Like many people, I am fascinated by property programmes and watch every one my husband will allow (he gets a bit fed up with them!) Writing a book about an estate agent was a brilliant excuse to look at Right Move, pour over the property pages and watch a lot of television. One of the reasons I wanted to do it was because I think they have an undeserved reputation. Why are they always cast as the baddies? They must help hundreds of people find the house of their dreams – or make them realise they have to compromise – so I wanted one as a heroine.

Of course I based her on Kirstie Allsopp! My heroine, Bella, is always full of ideas of how houses could be improved and is willing people to compromise when they are very set in their ideas about what they want, even if they don’t have the budget. And the really picky clients in the book are based – very closely! – on my beloved sister and her husband.

Creating the houses that appear in the book was one of the best parts. I loved thinking about 
houses I'd seen in real life or on television or in the paper and putting bits of them into the 
houses I describe.

One of the most fun bits of research was spending a day with a very helpful firm of estate 
agents. They weren't crooks! They just want people to either sell their houses (and they would go to enormous lengths to make this happen) or buy the house that was right for them. They have such a bad reputation but really, most of them are good people wanting to do a good job! It was a real effort of will for me not to say on viewings, 'if only you cleared all the ivy from in front of the windows, the room would be full of light' and such things. Of course if I'd been a real estate agent I probably wouldn't have managed to keep my mouth shut! Bella said out loud all the things I'd only thought.

Three years ago Bella Castle left her home town nursing a broken heart over Dominic Thane, the man she fell in love with but couldn't have.

Now she's made a new life for herself in the country, working as an estate agent.

Bella loves her job and she loves her boyfriend Nevil. But recently he's been preoccupied, and she's starting to question if his future hopes and dreams are a perfect match for hers.

And when Dominic turns up unexpectedly in search of his dream house, she begins to wonder if home is really where the heart is. But she's over him, isn't she?

If you love the sound of The Perfect Match then you're in luck as thanks to Katie's lovely publicist Rose I have 2 copies to be won (UK residents only), follow the instructions in the Rafflecopter form below to enter.  Entries close at midnight on 18th March when the winners will be selected and contacted for their postal address to be passed to the publisher to post the book to you. 

a Rafflecopter giveaway