All through the buying process, the sellers' solicitor has been really difficult. We got no responses to enquiries for two weeks, only a third of them were answered, and when our solicitor asked for responses to the ones that had not yet been answered, he outright refused to answer a number of them, and would not give straight answers to others. The seller is also refusing to respond to any "further" enquiries (i.e. ones that were already there, but they didn't answer the first time), and we are wondering if that is because their solicitor told them not to bother.
We don't know how much of the difficulty is coming from the solicitor vs. the sellers, but we are certainly sensing a lot of bad feeling, and based on the, frankly rude, responses from their solicitor, we are wondering if it's all down to the interactions of the solicitors. We're supposed to be exchanging next week and completing right at the end of June, and yesterday our solicitor asked theirs to make a simple amendment to the contract to protect us financially in case of the sellers not completing on the agreed date. The sellers' solicitor replied at the end of the day today, with a very rude email, saying that they do not agree to that. It turns out he may not have even put it to the seller! If they don't agree then we feel we will have no option but to walk away, because this is really the last straw following a string of unreasonable behaviour, and we have made a lot of concessions in this process that others might not, including pushing the completion date back at their request. (We are cash buyers, so have a bit more leniency with some things, but I'm tempted to just get a mortgage next time so that sellers have to take potential problems seriously).
I can't help feeling like this process would have been a lot simpler if we had discussed most of these things between ourselves first (sellers and buyers), and then sent everything through the solicitors afterwards to have it all down in the legal documentation. Having solicitors trying to score points against each other just creates a feeling that the sellers are unreasonable people, and I expect they are thinking the same of us. The estate agent has hammered into both us and the sellers that we should not communicate directly with each other about any conveyancing matters, but frankly I think the sale may fall through if we don't, because their solicitor seems to be trying to obstruct what should be a simple process (no chain on either end).
Have others experienced this? What is their solicitor trying to achieve by behaving like this? Has anyone had a better experience by communicating with the sellers directly?
Please or to access all these features
Please
or
to access all these features
Join our Property forum for renovation, DIY, and house selling advice.
Property/DIY
Do conveyancers *try* to create animosity?
44 replies
BuyingWoes · 11/06/2021 22:49
OP posts:
Don’t want to miss threads like this?
Weekly
Sign up to our weekly round up and get all the best threads sent straight to your inbox!
Log in to update your newsletter preferences.
You've subscribed!
Please create an account
To comment on this thread you need to create a Mumsnet account.