AIBU to be furious with the creep buying our house?

[reallypissedoffhouseseller]

We're selling our flat and moving to get a garden for DS. Had two good offers at asking price within the first week of it being on the market, and went for the one we did because the line was that he was a cash buyer, no mortgage, no sale to arrange, and could do speedy exchange and then complete when we wanted to.

Fast forward two months - we have found a house to buy, and we're all ready to exchange on the purchase. I discover this week, from our solicitor who also had no idea till now, that the thing holding up the sale is that the buyer is getting a mortgage from HSBC, who are separately represented and holding it up - they're insisting on getting a lease extension drafted and agreed before we can exchange contracts. Solicitor and I had been cheerfully carrying on assuming that we could get consent to the lease extension (which we have), include it as a condition of the contract that we do it, then get it drafted and signed between exchange and completion. Now our seller is jumping up and down wanting to exchange, and we can't till the buyer's mortgage, that he said he didn't need, is sorted.

AIBU to be absolutely livid at being lied to? To be honest, if we didn't want to avoid letting our seller down, we'd just pull out and write off the money we've spent so far. There is now no good outcome: either we saddle our nice next-door neighbours with a dishonest lying creep when we move, or we let down our blameless seller.

sorry, that should have said his house* back on the market.

When i hear it, i don't think cash buyer means no mortgage, To me it means no chain.

Yes, cash buyer can mean different things.

However, when we sold our first house, the first time buyer specifically stated that he had the money in the bank. Turned out to be a huge lie, we pulled out and sold our house to someone else.

House buying and selling is a terrible process and brings out all people's bad qualities. I would go as far as to term people who lie during these times as utter scum.

Op you have my sympathies, this exact thing happened to us several years ago. I think it's pretty common. Our 'cash' buyer messed us around for weeks and weeks and then decided she needed a mortgage. Her excuse was that her accountant had told her too. Our seller was livid (he was a difficult character anyway). Basically we were told to complete the following weekend or loose the house we wanted.

I missed my best friends wedding because it fell that weekend. It was a nightmare all round, completing and exchanging on the same day (very stressful because we were moving over 200 miles).

Anyway, I suppose my point is I've always regretted jumping through hoops for two different people when we were doing everything 'right'. Taking their moody shit, and being terrified of loosing the new house etc. I wish I'd just called everyone's bluff and said to our seller 'fine put your house back on the Market, we'll find another one' and gone to my mates wedding. And told our buyer to sling her hook, and put our house back on the Market.

flagnogbagnog, that's a salutary story - thank you. Our seller isn't being particularly difficult (in fact over lots of things he's being really helpful), and I can sympathise with him: he's got to move for work, and he accepted our offer because we looked in a good position with our sale. I do think calling the buyer's bluff is a good idea though: it might teach him not to mess people around in future (and it might teach the agent to be a bit more cautious).

hermione, I agree that "cash buyer" by itself wouldn't necessarily mean no mortgage, but agent specifically told us this slimeball was buying with money from a trust fund.

get a friend to ring up your estate agent and enquire about your property to see what the estate agent says.

I'd also tell your estate agent that if he told you the buyer was a cash buyer and you lose any money as a result of this not being the case then you expect him to cover any losses you made as a result of spending money based on this falsehood. If he is such good mates with the buyer then he can get the buyer to pay him back. Even if you can't legally demand this there's no risk in telling him that you plan to do this - might buck his ideas up a bit.

did you get a deposit from the buyer that you could withold if he screws this all up?

Or tell him to pay out of his trust fund and then get the mortgage in his own time to put back into his trust fund...

good luck, it's miserable isn't it. we had a buyer who strung us along for ages (having chosen the one that wasn't in a chain we thought) and then he dropped out the day before exchange (having delayed it several times for him) as he bought something else instead.

Luckily the estate agent contacted the other person that had put in an offer and he was still interested so we sold within a few weeks, all went through very easily...

HSBC are shit.

we were the buyers trying to get a mortgage with them 15 months or so ago, and they just farted about relentlessly for fecking weeks, ignoring our solicitor, and ended up decided the house wasn't suitable for a mortgage, but wouldn't tell us why for several more weeks. and they missold us the mortgage anyway, but slimed their way around giving us back the fee. utter bastards.

we bought a different house in the end, with a different mortgage company.

anyway, YANBU, and I agree with others that you should be having words with your estate agent. hope it's sorted soon, it must be v. stressful :(

I'm now feeling relatively Zen about it, having been boiling with rage for the last two days. The creep and his professional advisers will almost certainly not pull their finger out on Monday, which means I'm going to have to instruct the estate agent to put the flat back on the market on Tuesday morning, but at least the creep doesn't get our lovely flat and the neighbours won't have to put up with him.

We'll almost certainly lose our purchase, but a lot of the work on the lease extension has now been done so we should be able to move faster with another buyer, and there are lots of nice houses in our price range in the area we're moving to.

Update: as predicted, the creep failed to come up with the goods. House back on the market in the morning. Now I have to find the right form of words to tell our unfortunate seller that it's all gone pear-shaped...

how frustrating

do you think buyer and EA are in cahoots together?

Isn't your seller marketing his house through an EA? If so, shouldn't it be the EA who breaks the bad news to him? If not, good luck, hope he takes it well.

And another vote for the HSBC Is Shit campaign. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice to say, however good a mortgage deal they offered, they won't be getting our business.

No, I don't want to do this through the EA: the seller has been very nice to us and the last thing I want to do is hide behind someone else. Besides, there's always a risk of Chinese whispers, and I want to be sure I've given him the proper facts.

Don't think buyer and our EA are in cahoots (it hasn't done the agent any good if so: he's just waved goodbye to his commission on this sale), but I think because he knows the family and the trust fund he was probably a bit less thorough with this guy than he would have been with a buyer he'd never heard of.

Tell the seller you've been let down and if you can sell again quikly you'll be back to him. That's all anybody can expect. Your 'buyer' is a beast!

If you have a complaint against a property professional, complain to the RICS

malevolentpsammead, it's not going through HSBC that I'm complaining about, it's purporting to be a cash buyer and then involving a mortgage. That he then got the mortgage from a notoriously awful bank makes matters worse, but it's not the whole story.

I've got to say that to me, cash buyer means no chain involved, not no mortgage involved.

You do have my sympathy though, when I moved 9 years ago, the twats inexperienced first-time buyers buying my house messed us around so much that we ended up moving in 2 weeks before we eventually exchanged contracts. We paid rent to our vendors, was absolutely horrendous.

Squirrelz, the agent specifically said no mortgage, finance there from trust fund, blah blah. Agreed cash buyer is an ambiguous term.

I've written my apologetic email to the seller saying our buyer is an unprincipled creep and has let us down and the house is back on the market, so we'll see if he takes pity on us and gives us a grace period to find another buyer.