A comma... again.

[Fishbowl Helmet]

"We sell the cottage to the first people who come to see it, a professional-looking couple in matching raincoats."

I'll break the pattern and say it's off.

The trouble is the verbs "sell" and "come".

If you're referring to a future event from the perspective of the narrator/speaker (i.e. will sell) then the second clause is out of place. You jump from a future event (we will sell it / who come to see it) to a past event (we have sold it to them) with that comma. Something else should be in there like a "who were", "who turned out to be", or whatever.

If you're referring to an event that happened in the past from the perspective of the narrator/speaker (i.e. have sold, or sold) then the verbs "sell" and "come" are the wrong conjugation (should be "sold" and "came").

"Here's the plan: We sell the cottage to the first people who come to see it, a professional-looking couple in matching raincoats."

The speaker is presenting the sentence as a future event, or a plan for the future, but he can't know before it's happened who will eventually turn up to look at the house first.

"It was a simple plan: We sold the cottage to the first people who came to see it, a professional-looking couple in matching raincoats."

The speaker is recounting something that happened in the past and can honestly provide both pieces of information, with the right conjugation.

 

[Vertigo]

For what it's worth I'd go with VB's early comments; that last 'to see it' leaves me expecting comment on the cottage not the people. I couldn't see what made me uncomfortable about the sentence until I saw his post and I think dropping that 'to see it,' as in his version, works much more smoothly.

 

[Hex]

Thanks

It was the comma that worried me (but I agree I'm playing fast and loose with the present tense).

 

[Ursa major]

I don't think you're playing fast and loose at all, Hex. (Your only sin is the writing of present tense narrative. )

I'll break the pattern and say it's off.

The trouble is the verbs "sell" and "come".

If you're referring to a future event from the perspective of the narrator/speaker (i.e. will sell) then the second clause is out of place. You jump from a future event (we will sell it / who come to see it) to a past event (we have sold it to them) with that comma. Something else should be in there like a "who were", "who turned out to be", or whatever.

The present tense, as used in real life, is a different animal to the past tense and the future tense. It's used for all sorts of things, including actions in the future ("I fly to New York next Tuesday") and habitual actions ("I travel to work by train") that, by definitin, have been going on in the past. I suppose that this difference is inevitable: the present is an instant; the past is a period of time that stretches back from that instant to the beginning of time; the future is a period of time that stretches forward to the end of time.

And then we come to present tense narration, where the present is not an instant, but is somehow transformed into a period of time, the period between things described as being in the past and things described as being in the future. The narrative present isn't the same as everyday life's present. In fact, for all intents and purposes it's the past brought into the present.

So lets turn the past tense version of the narrative

We sold the cottage to the first people who came to see it, a professional-looking couple in matching raincoats.
​

into the present tense version

"We sell the cottage to the first people who come to see it, a professional-looking couple in matching raincoats."
​

No meaning is lost. No sense of time and sequence is lost: if it's unclear what happened in what order in the present tense version, that is also true of the past tense version.

For example, you probably assume that the cottage was sold after the couple saw it; however, some people buy a house without having seen it. Your assumption is based on the most likely sequence of events -- the couple did view the cottage before buying -- and the unconscious use of logic to bolster your assumption: if the purchasers saw the cottage after purchase, and were the first people to view it, anyone else viewing the cottage would be doing so after it was no longer on the market. (But that doesn't mean someone didn't take a sneaky view of the no-longer-for-sale property.)