Can I hear your house buying and selling nightmares?

[ShirleyPhallus]

Currently buying (or trying to buy!) a house. Pregnant and due in early March.

Sellers know this so we want to be in by Christmas. They’ve now decided they “might want to stay in the house” for Christmas. Oh have they now, how wonderful. While it’s not a total deal breaker, it will be a huge pain in the arse to be moving that close to giving birth.

So while I’m in a grump about that, can I please have some perspective with stories of buyers and sellers being utter nightmares?

I moved into our first house at 38 weeks pregnant. It was all ok.
Good luck!

I moved 6 hours away 6 months pregnant and it was all ok! It’s nice nesting in a way.... not ideal I appreciate. It was my second though so I was already carrying around a 4yo.

When we bought this one the seller didn’t really seem to understand it couldn't be done in a week and we had to wait for searches. He kept getting annoyed I was delaying it all, when it was totally out of my hands

due to exchange today - everyone ready to move in 3 weeks and our buyers have pulled out .. so 4 months wasted and much money .. hate HATE HATE our system

My buyer refused to sign any papers in September because it was bad luck in Sikhism to make any impirtamt decisions in those 2 weeks. His sister had got married previously a few years before in that period and since divorced. Obviously proving this theory correct.

OMG Queen that is horrible! I'm so sorry. I am in the process of buying now and I absolutely dread this kind of thing.

Queen that is awful, you poor thing! What reason did he give for pulling out?

Following with interest and sympathy. I don’t think our situation counts as a nightmare (it’s approaching a year since we accepted an offer on our house. It took 8 months for that to complete. Currently in “borrowed” housing from a relative, discovered last week that the house we’re trying to buy will potentially be changing from a pre-Xmas target completion to an Easter 2020 target...)

@Queenonfleek - that's awful. I'm sorry .
When my Dad died suddenly I had to sell his bungalow. It was awful. Got a buyer straight away but they really dragged their heels. This was wrong, that was wrong - the list went on and on as did the months. Exchange date kept being put back. In the end I said if we don't complete by xxx date, we're putting it back on the market. We did complete eventually but it was very stressful especially dealing with probate, grief and everything else.
OP what are you going to do? If it was me I'd want to move in for Christmas too

We completed when I started maternity leave at 37 weeks, it worked

Only in as much as our solicitor was vague at the best of times when it came to getting any definitive answers out of her.
She told us that the shared freehold (on the property we were selling) 'wouldn't be a problem' and that 'we can sort it all out nearer the time', and until we kept on at her that it needed to be all resolved, signed and in writing (the other freeholders acknowledging and accepting that we were sellng our share), then it would hold up the buyer as well as us.
She then wouldn't confirm if we were to exchange and complete on the same day, but said 'it was likely'.
When we rang, two days before the given completion/exchange date, to check all was going according to plan (as we had paid a hefty deposit for a removal and packing company) we found out that she had gone on leave for two weeks and hadn't handed our details over to anyone.
To add insult to injury I discovered she was a senior partner in the company.

As it turned out, our buyer and the people we were buying from were very organised, and we had no problems on the day. A week later we got a letter asking us to clarify something about the shared freehold on the property we'd sold.

• 33 Weeks in total end July 2018 - 5th April 2019
• 2 houses we were trying to purchase as a result fell through
• Turned out we didn't own ouw own garage (leasehold)
• Had to pay almost £6K to buy our own garage in order to sell it
• Had to live in a budget hotel bedroom for 4 weeks with 2 small children

But now we're in the house of our dreams! It was, er, fun...

Our estate agents did a lot of shit stirring and eventually where told to stop moving the goal posts I.e. apparently they could not chase the buyer's solicitor but could hassle me to chase mine. Eventually they where told to not contact me but to contact DH.
The buyer complained that our solicitor went on holiday - how the F am I meant to stop someone going on holiday? 🙄
The buyer kept on asking the same question but instead of the estate agent saying you have asked this question - fed the question back to us to answer. Even had questions from the buyer AFTER we completed. If the estate agent was not holding the money for the white goods I would have told them where to go

Can I just add we moved heaven and earth as we had a cash buyer offering the full asking price.

We sold a shared ownership house 18 months ago. Our buyers were so un-fucking-believably slow. I'm talking like 3-4 weeks to fill in each form type of slowness. We had no choice but to sell to them (as in shared ownership the housing association choose the buyers) so we just had to keep waiting for them. We lost out on two houses we wanted to buy waiting for them. Whole process ended up taking months. After we left they actually had the nerve to send a letter to our solicitor complaining that there was dust on the lampshades when they moved in and felt we should compensate them for this. We had left the sodding lampshades for free and everything. Utter twats.

Our buyers were due to exchange in August, they’ve delayed exchange at the very last minute 3 times since then. It’s driving us bonkers. We would pull out but we’ve sunk so much money into the process so far.

Oh that's shit Queen. What a crappy system we have in this country.

OP what are you going to do? If it was me I'd want to move in for Christmas too

I want to be in for then but do have some sympathy for them as they have young kids and haven’t yet found a house themselves

That said, the new house isn’t very close to where I live atm and so we need to switch hospitals, attend NCT etc plus want to be able to decorate the nursery (currently a pre-teenage boys room in fetching shades of football green and Star Wars)

It’s also just the not knowing and wanting to be firm without being so firm they pull out of sale

My friend had a nightmare story. They bought a house from an elderly lady, who suddenly decided that she's simply not physically moving out after the completion as she did not like her new retirement facility. A lengthy and expensive legal nightmare followed, including doubts as to whether the seller was of sound mind when selling (she started slipping into dementia really fast).

I'm trying to sell a house in France (my parents bought it - they're now dead/have dementia). Got past the equivalent of exchange (which took forever and has been a nightmare). Went over, spent small fortune clearing the place out. Then receive a letter from the French rural affairs agency, exercising pre-emption rights on sale, the twat farmer next door now decides he wants the place, so France being ruled by the farmers, means that the sale has gone out the window, whilst I wait for the agency to confirm if it will in fact buy the property or not.

Apparently this happens in 0.4% of sales in France. Insane system and makes life a misery. So we're now in total limbo, waiting for the French agency to revert by 8 November (or when they please, since they have a decidedly cavalier attitude towards deadlines) and then see what happens.

I haven't had anything go wrong but it's been ages and ages and ages going through! We complete on Friday 🙌🏻. Ours is probably the easiest house buy ever (or so we thought)
Something needs to be done to make it less stressful and long

@needmoresleep1 I have everything crossed for you!!