When buying a house, do you give your notice on the rental at exchange or completion?

[HowdyBubble]

This is chain free on both sides and my current landlord requires at least a month notice. Obviously I’d rather not pay both mortgage and rent for long periods simultaneously.

Is it safe enough to give notice at rental at point of exchange of contracts? I understand there would be penalties if the seller pulled out after exchange but what kind of penalties in a chain-free transaction? Just a refund of what I’d paid or something more?

Or is it better to wait until completion date?

If you give notice at completion, you'd be paying a month's rent for nothing. BUT: our most recent house purchase nearly fell through when the vendor had a heart attack. We found this out when he gave us the keys; he'd only been out of hospital a week 😬😬😬😬

Our completion dragged out because the buyers went on holiday! We were supposed to complete in july. Didn't complete until Sept 2nd.

Agree a completion date and give notice to coincide with that. Give yourself a couple of days overlap so you aren't moving house and clearing a rental all on the same day.

Ask for the completion date to be a month in advance & give it then.

Our agents advised us to give notice once we had exchanged.

We've done rental to purchase twice now. In one transaction we had to pay rent for two weeks concurrently with a mortgage. On another, we had a long gap between exchange and completion (6 weeks) so we gave notice after. Depends what you can negotiate and how much you want the property/the buyer wants to sell.

We gave notice at exchange. 1 calendar month and competed 2 weeks later.
It actually worked out really well as we could move out of the house without pressure.

We went to the new house, made sure it was all clean (it was spotless) and then moved kitchen stuff and beds, got them set up and then moved everything else.

Then went back to the rented house and gave it a thorough clean over a week as it was completely empty, shampooed the carpets etc
Then gave the keys back on our last day of contract