To think previous owners of our new house were being unreasonable?

That's not how it works in Scotland.

Their solicitor had the money for the house. They had no right to stay there.

Indeed.

But these particular cheeky fucker vendors clearly had received the OP's money as they had handed over the keys!

You’ll be annoyed right now but remember after a while in your new home you’ll forget all about it.

Always read about these sorts of crazy stories! We moved last year and had packed up and handed in keys but were waiting for the call from the solicitors to say we can collect the keys to our new home. We had an hour of sat in our cars outside our old home whilst waiting, we certainly didn’t keep a spare set of keys and sat in our old home when it wasn’t ours! Very odd behaviour of your vendors.

Its strange that your sellers actually handed in the keys before they were ready to move. Any time iv moved iv dropped keys into the estate agent after leaving my old house for the last time. I can see how it took the shine from your day and wasn't ideal but after reading some other horror stories in the scheme of things it could have been worse! Congratulations on your new home

@Didimum You’re not wrong - mountain out of a molehill seems to be the basis of pretty much every thread on MN at the moment. Just non events. If these are AI generated they’re going off on some very weird and uninteresting tangents.

I once bought a house. Funds were transferred mid afternoon, and we became the legal owners. It then took the previous owners six hours to hand over the keys. We ended up unpacking all our belongings onto the drive because we had to return the van, then moving them again once we had the key. That was a stressful evening, as we wondered if we were going to spend our first night camping.

Question - how do the buyers of the first house pay for their house if they haven’t sold their house yet?

It is bottom up. You’re wrong on this.

But completion wasn't messy. The funds transferred. The previous owners had given the keys to their solicitor. They just then decided not to move at that time.

was the ops house and the previous owners were just that and shouldn't have been there.

it wasn't anything to do with the completion and everything to do with the previous owners being cf.

Thought you were going to say you couldn’t move in. Appreciate it was inconvenient though!

A friend arrived at her new home to find the previous owner with his feet up watching TV. He hadn’t moved a single thing because he didn’t trust the process and wanted to make sure they arrived. No removals firm booked or anything. Absolute madness and chaos! 😅

She can laugh about it now. All they could do was put a hold on their move, pay for a B&B and keep stuff in vans overnight. Never heard anything like it!

It's the same in England! Why would it not be?

Once you have the money for your house, it's not yours. You've no right to be in it. If your purchase fails, you're homeless.

The seller had handed over the keys though. You don’t have the keys over until you have their money.
When you hand over the keys, the assumption is that you lock the door behind you. Not hand the keys over then sit in the property.

No. You can only get the keys when the seller has the money. If people misunderstand that, they're idiots!

Happened to us! Arrived to skip into our first home together to find the sellers say outside having a fag break! Said it had taken them longer than they thought it would so they’d have to leave this until tomorrow 😮 I was 7 months pregnant at the time and not best pleased. Our estate agent was aghast and said “never in all my years…”. They also left crappy nightshades and boobs that they never connected that I ended up talking to the dump 😡

Scotlabd had a different system to England and chains aren’t really a thing. Sane people soles however when it coves to comes relate/keys available. That’s competition and when it happens ownership passes to the buyers so the sellers have no right to either have themselves or their stuff in the house.

But, on The Day, the money goes via solicitors escrow accounts and the bank - so thete can be a time lag between you paying for the house and the vendor getting the money through.

So at those points anyone can be a dick about it, ie, I've paid so its mine/ I've not got the money so it's not yours yet.

It's the same in England. Once you're sold, and you have the money, that's it. If your purchase fails you're homeless!

They're homeless. Same as Scotland

Thanks, so posters really are talking nonsense then! Ive only ever bought and sold in Scotland.

If you go to a cafe and buy a cake then cake is then yours.
The cafe owner can't keep your cake while they decide how to spend the money.
Or while they wait for their purchase fro Amazon to arrive.
They have to give you your cake.

The house is yours when the money goes through. Not the sellers.

Theres no "uk" property laws, in Scotland we have a different system.

But, as soon as the money is transferred to the vendors account, the house isnt theirs. There's often a stressful moving day where everything is done, the deal can't fall through without legal recompense (that's not the right word), but theres a bit of a delay with keys, money, removal vans, etc. You kind of just have to go with it and not be a walker er- sounds like your vendors were.

Yes. Same in England!

Buyer 1 buys. Money goes to seller 1 / buyer 2. Seller 1 / buyer 2's money goes to seller 2 / buyer 3. Seller 2 / buyer 3's money goes to seller 3. Seller 3 is going into rented, chain ends.

If seller 1 / buyer 2's money gets trapped between their sale and purchase, it's tough. They're homeless. Same as Scotland!

In a chain, it’s meant to move from top down. The solicitors are supposed to communicate with each other from top down.

I’m always confounded by the confidence with which posters can assert absolute guff.

That's not how it works, legally, when the money goes through to your vendors, the house is legally yours. The vendors have no legal right to stay a minute past that point.

It becomes a chain because nobody can get their money until their buyer gets theirs. It must be the same in Scotland.

No, they're in effect unconnected transactions. Once your house is sold and you have the money, it's not your house, and not your buyer's problem if there's a snag or delay with your own purchase.

Yeah, there are loads of replies from people saying ‘no big deal, we just sat outside for an hour while waiting for the keys’. That’s an entirely different situation. The OP had the keys, the house was hers. There’s absolutely no situation in which it’s reasonable for a seller to hand over the keys, having received their buyer’s money, but stay hanging around in the house. It doesn’t belong to them.

i can’t believe that how many people believe that a chain works from top down. How can I buy my next house until I have released the funds from the sale of mine.

once the sale has completed the new owners own the house. The previous owners have sold their house regardless of where they have anywhere to go to they no longer own the house they’re in.

it may be called something differently in Scotland but surely there still effectively a chain. I.e the buyers use the funds from the sale of their house plus mortgage to fund the onward purchase.

as a side note I have sold in both Scotland and England and Scotland has by far the Joe simpler process.