Charlotte Lytton said her experience of simply moving home was 'sheer madness' - Geoff PughShare your house buying stories in the comments below or by emailing money@telegraph.co.uk*The process of buying a house last year was an exercise in testing the outer reaches of my sanity. From the moment you start looking to move in England, the process is replete with time-wasting and ineptitude, gazumping and gazundering and foot-dragging middlemen with zero accountability. That figure has risen by 26pc in the last four years, and is now at its highest for almost a decade. An exercise in patienceI found myself caught up in this mess last year when moving from my north London two-bed to a house in east London. Buying my property over a decade ago, when both myself and the seller were chain-free, took seven months.