To think there should be a fine for vendors pulling out of a property buy/sell process last minute?

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Just had this happen. Pregnant, strung along for months, collapsed a sizable chain because a couple of immature children think it's acceptable to pull out the day of exchange. I'm broken hearted, wasted all my money and savings and I have never felt so much hatred for two strangers. From speaking to the agent they have no genuine reason, just playing a bit of a game with us all I guess. How is this legal? It is the cruelest thing anyone has ever done to my family and I don't want to start it all again but now I have to with way less money. We had spent months getting our house ready for them as their first home, deep cleaning, painting, repairing.. turns out they never deserved any of it. It's really knocked me and I have no faith in anything now or people but I have to just get on with it :(

Yanbu - there should be a fine to stop this from being possible after a certain point.
Yabu - it's okay for people to do this.

You'd be less confused if you read all of OP's posts. It's good etiquette for all threads.

I'm so sorry OP. We had this happen on the day of exchange - we lost thousands. We ended up buying somewhere much nicer. The stress and misery of buying and selling is awful. I really hope you manage to find somewhere else.

I like the American system

When you make an offer, you attach a check with ernest money, its to show the seller that you are serious about your offer, usually $1000 but can be more if you want to increase the chances of your offer being accepted.

If your offer is accepted the check is cashed and held by the estate agent in an escrow account. It is applied to the sale when you complete and retained by the sellers if you withdraw.
Then you have the option to list conditions in your offer (or waive some or all of them to make your offer more attractive). Common conditions are getting a mortgage approved, surveys with less than x amount of work needed, solicitor searches. BUT the offer states that each of these conditions has to be fulfilled within a certain amount of time. So we will get our mortgage confirmed within 3 weeks and a survey within 2 weeks. The solicitors usually do the searches within 3 weeks, but we have had them done within the week. The more efficient dates in the offer, the more attractive it is to the sellers.

Then in the offer you commit to exchange on a certain date and complete of a certain date (or before) and when you exchange you commit to paying over a chunk of money, often 10% of the purchase price..but often more.

If you pull out for any reasons not covered in the offer, you loose all monies up to that point and are also liable to be sued if the sellers choose.

The system provides a decent amount of checks and balances but most importantly having all the dates listed means the systems moves forward in a professional manner and you cant gazump or gazunder. If changes are needed to dates etc, the estate agents negotiate between both parties and problems can be accomodated. One property we were buying we needed to change the date of completion to earlier. The sellers didnt want to as they didnt know they could get the house emptied in time, so we compromised that they didnt have to empty the detached garage for another 2 weeks after completion and the date change was agreed to. The solicitors just added words to the sale documents to protect both parties for that event.

I think part of the problem in the UK is the crazy amount of time the searches take. Given how much of the documentation is online now, I think it should be possible to speed it up hugely.

I really feel for you OP. It happened to me five times and took two years to finally sell.

Excuses, genuine or not; argument over bedrooms, insurance too high, cancer diagnosis, didn't like it was a private road (solicitor who knew full well when he offered) and not sure if the camper van fitted on the drive (ours did). We packed and unpacked boxes, sold furniture and felt so dispirited. Finally went back on market and had a bidding war in one weekend.

Hopefully you'll get a straightforward sale this time. Someone in rented with no chain is ideal.

Oh yeah, not saying it would be easy and I guess that's why it's not the case but I think one would be able to document redundancy or a serious medical diagnosis. Though doubtless people would find loopholes!

So obvious how it could fail too.

The buyer basically relies on the seller completely for all the information, that that information is compiled reliably and correctly. The seller of course having a massive VI biased towards them in making sure all information presents their property in the best way possible.

I don't think the homebuyer pack is worthless. It helps reduce some of the potential for the offer to break down. But it doesn't really do away with the need for the buyer to do their own checks and all the issues associated with that.

I am sure though all sellers would be happy to compile and pay for L3 surveys on their property before selling.

I did, but it was still confusing- about them ''kitchen shopping''.

Assuming they were looking at kitchens to go into her house?

Also 'Children' - sounds like they are first time buyers.

That's really interesting - thanks! Seems pretty sensible to have the conditions as part of your offer.

The law strives to reduce ambiguity/subjectivity if possible. Subjective clauses are what lawyers can make most money on.

What is important to people is very subjective. Should you be able to pull out if your partner dies, you are made redundant, your parent dies, if you have a miscarraige, a much loved pet dies ?

These all mean different things to different people and therein lies the problem of coming up with a defintion within the law.

When you look at a law or rule, it's always instructive to question why it is written the way it is and if you try to think how you would rewrite it it is often the case that a rewrite brings in a whole new load of consequences you hadn't actually thought of originally.

That's why people saying, it's simple and obvious are nearly always wrong. Because if it was simple and obvious something would be done about it.

At the moment as regards house buying in England there is no real process and a sale is governed by contract law. Any defintion in law of a process that must occur before the contract is signed has to be thought of carefully, because it will nearly always lead to some sort of skew towards either the buyer or the seller in terms of benefits gained in the process.

My guess is that any process imposed in law will not probably solve the issues, but it may change them and create a whole load of new ones and bias the process with benefits to either the seller or the buyer. Whether these would be worse or better than the ones we have at the moment would be hard to tell until people start trying to use the system, and the inevitable happens as people try to exploit it and we see the consequences of that.

Except they wouldn’t. The home buyer’s pack was a disaster because nobody wanted to pay for it.

Ultimately a house is the biggest purchase you’re ever going to make in your life. By forcing people into paying deposits up front, paying fines if they back out etc you would ensure that only those who were ready would proceed, but you would narrow the market hugely, because people would decide to stay rather than to risk buying while e.g. between jobs/expecting a baby/ttc/so many other things.

It is shit. I’ve had buyers pull out but I also pulled out of a sale a week before exchange for perfectly valid reasons.

Should people be penalised for life changes?

Awful people. I’ve had that happen but with the sellers pulling the plug and it turned out they had done that twice before to others - insisted they wanted to sell and then pulled out on exchange and then started the process over again. It’s disgusting behaviour.

I think there should be a cooling off period of about two months after you commit to buying and after that you should only be able to pull out if there are serious defects that you weren’t aware of. Not just because you don’t fancy it anymore. If you want to pull out after that, you should be made to pay some sort of fine (maybe not 10% but a prohibitive amount).

It's absolutely wicked. I can't comprehend why a government hasn't found a bit of parliamentary time to sort out a system that everyone hates - apart from people looking to take advantage.

Absolutely crazy system here, one of the (many) things that as someone not from the UK I will never get my head around in terms of why people tolerate this system and there hasn't been reform. Completely inefficient from an economic perspective and OP as you have sadly experienced, it has a major impact on people's lives as well as it's such a long process both financially and emotionally and you can be shafted at the last minute by unscrupulous buyers or sellers. For those saying people's circumstances change, yes, it's a risk allocation though - even where people pull out due to unforeseen circumstances such as marriage breakdown, cancer diagnosis etc (rare cases in any event compared to time wasters or people who just change their mind) that should be their risk and they should lose say a 10% deposit, that's the way it works in most other countries, rather than shifting the risk to the counterparty to the sale. Solidarity OP, we are in the same boat at the moment, pregnant and now won't be able to move before baby arrives due to shitty behaviour from buyers.

There should definitely be a no backsies point.

A friend of mine recently had someone pull out a week before exchange - turned out she was buying a different house and just kept it quiet! My friend was so upset she'd spent lots of money meeting this woman's demands. It isn't fair to be able to do this

Which is now?

Echoing this although in my home country (Nordics) there's also a much greater burden on the seller to do the surveys and be upfront about potential issues. Overall a better system - it drags out so long here because buyers have to do endless investigations. Even if they don't find anything majorly wrong, it gives more time to get cold feet!

There is. It’s when everyone agrees to and signs the contract.

They think they’re clever / funny….

The issue is that (broadly speaking) no-one wants anyone else to be able to pull out but everyone also wants to be able to pull out if they themselves deem it reasonable.

It's not easy to square the circle.

I didn’t “pick it” as such, it was the in the comment you’d quoted when I replied to you. Some of these things aren’t anyones fault, they’re just like force majeure in regular contracts - what do you propose someone does when due to a serious change in circumstances they can’t get the same lending facility? A proportion of the fees people incur would be the fairest way but you couldn’t really take it much further.

The system is awful, but most people don’t go out of their way to drop out of sales at either end just for the fun of it.

We all hope these people shit Lego, but I'm not sure it's helping you to take this SO personally. Hatred, the cruellest thing that's ever happened to you, broken hearted, angry, despair, cold, cowardly, pathetic... just a selection of the words you've used in this thread. You seem to think this couple is sitting with a bottle of champagne laughing at you, when actually they're just selfish and not giving you a second thought.

I get it but I think you'll feel a lot better if you try to dial down the emotional response.

I am absolutely gutted for you, its so stressful and an absolutely ridiculous system in the UK. However on the flip side I've now got kids looking to buy a flat and the pressure to get in an offer above the asking price and panic that they wont get anything in London, I think has made them pay over the odds for somewhere and to be honest if they did find something more sensibly priced later on I would not blame them for pulling out.
The system is to blame for both the issues. We would all go for the highest bid but also there seems no consideration for who the "best buyer" would be. I also think estate agents don't give this enough consideration.

I agree.

It works for solicitors ... that's why it continues.