Bought house but they’re still in it now!

Same here. As dc was a toddler, we started a couple of weeks before completion. Spent a little time each day packing. Started with books, dvds, rarely used kitchen things. By the time it was a couple of days until moving, all we had unpacked was some clothes, toiletries, and one box full of kitchen stuff.

You have to be a bit careful here. If you don't take a stand it could be construed as permission and they then have squatters rights. You can't leave their stuff in the driveway.. you can be careless but not negligent.

The best thing would be to stop the money until they are able to complete the transaction but I suspect the only person who can make the position clear to them is their solicitor, and as you say, they're shut.

I really hope they finally left.. Otherwise, get a locksmith to attend right now, change the locks in front of them and try and get the money back via your solicitor.

Probably like everyone else on the thread, I'm wondering if you got into your new house last night or slept on the grass in the garden?

This.

Me too.

They are in breach of contract which states vacant possession on completion. A strong solicitors letter needed. I do hope you get it sorted.

Exactly. When everyone is advising to go to the most expensive hotel and charge the sellers etc it’s soooooo unlikely they will get the money back.

It’s so hard to get the money back though. We ended up having to hire two large skips (£700) as well as pack up boxes of stuff and leave it with neighbours for the sellers to collect later. The house was in an awful state, couldn’t have stayed there, mountains of rubbish and we had a baby. We weren’t able to recover the money, the costs of the solicitor would have been too much and they didn’t think they’d be able to without us going to court as the sellers just refused to pay

Hope you managed to get in last night

This happened to someone I know Only the house they were moving into the people hadn't packed a single thing on the Friday night and said - sue us if you don't like it but we will not be out until Monday evening.

Obviously it mean they had a lorry full of belongings and nowhere to go - so they had to find a hotel for 3 nights

The couple they were purchasing from were both legal, so no point in taking legal action as it would cost more to get back less

surprisingly their mail found its way into file 13 and never moved

Its no surprise people don’t bother to pack, clean or empty their old house when it seems so many people let them. Leaving them to pack up slowly and paying your own movers £2k extra or paying for a hotel and running up other huge costs is insane. Plus the migraine inducing stress!
If this happened to me I would be there at the agreed time and throwing the boxes into the garden and shoving the people out the door. It’s completely takes the piss out of the removals workers too as they get low wages and probably don’t want to wait around for ages either.
When our new house keys were lost by the estate agent for an hour or so we bought the removal workers teas and coffees and gave them £10 cash each. It cost us over £100 but we didn’t want someone else to be out of pocket because of someone else’s mistake.

Itsonlyrain. OP what happened are you in now ?

I was just going to ask if that’s a requirement

Hope you moved in op
Definitely phone the solicitors

There’s no legal requirement for it to be clean. It’s just a courtesy.

We had our buyers move in for ten days and not complete. They refused to pay over a bookcase door that had specifically been excluded. The agent said they'd paid and gave them keys. We ended up in litigation. The agent sided with them and trashed our reputation in the town. Sometimes it's the removals that cock up and under estimate. I've had that a few times.

Did you get in last night?

So even if they get their shit out, they're not going to have it clean... Let them know that you are going to be charging them the cost of a commercial clean, the hourly rate for your movers after 10am plus 50 pounds per hour.

They put a bottle of champagne in the recycling bin??

Happened to me too. I knew something would go wrong because we were we moving on the Friday and when I drove past on the Wednesday I could see all the photos, vases etc. still on the windowsills - I would have expected them to be packed up by then. Their Solicitor asked for us to wait for a couple of hours as they were still packing. We gave them until 6pm and then insisted that was it. It was time to go. Later in the week I discovered the contents of a drinks cabinet in the recycling bin. Managed to fish out the Baileys and a bottle of Champagne to enjoy.

I'm invested.

What happened in the end?

I had this with my first house purchase. A tiny cottage. The seller ended up leaving at midnight, also it was left in a filthy state. Luckily I wasn’t moving in straight away.

We actually did this to someone, albeit we were only about 2 hours late getting everything out. It was horrendous. Our movers were useless, didn't do what they said they'd do, our vendor didn't hand over the keys on time (we were only moving 2 doors down so we thought we'd be able to move some stuff into the van and then move some stuff direct from house to house so it was clear by the time the buyers were due to arrive - we were inexperienced and optimistic and the movers were liars). It was HIDEOUSLY stressful and I was so apologetic and the buyers were really kind, if understandably pretty frustrated. Their movers ended up having to start moving stuff in as we were moving stuff out and I was frantically cleaning behind our movers to make sure it was decent... meanwhile my then 5 year old had a really high temperature and was sitting on a box outside the house with his grandmother looking after him. Awful. But. On NO PLANET would I have told the buyers they would just have to wait to take possession! I was worried they'd never forgive us but they did.

I don't get this, they agreed a day for completion. If they weren't going to be ready they should have agreed a later date at the time not on the day. I'd be fuming and pestering the solicitor and estate agent.

I had 2 weeks between exchange and completion, enough time to sort removal guys out and pack up the last of my bits.

What ended up happening?