To offer on a house as a no chain buyer but then try to sell my house first?

[Housequestionsss]

Our house is currently on the market. We’ve seen a property that we’d like to put an offer in on. The sellers of this property need to sell in order to buy their next property.

We have the affordability to buy this property without selling ours (with the use of a bridging loan). However we don’t actually want to do this due to the high interest rates that we would incur.

AIBU to use this mortgage in principle to get the vendor to remove their house from the market, but then get our own estate agents to sell our house ASAP (by listing it at a really good price for a fast sale)? The reduction in price for a fast sale would cost us less than the interest on the bridging loan.

I would try to sell our house within 4 weeks and if it’s not sold, then to go ahead with the new mortgage and bridging loan.

If you have the ability and intention to 100% honour the purchase irrespective of whether your house sells or not then go for it.

However if you are just winging it and would have to pull out without a sale then you should be honest about this.

There may also be penalties if you sign a legally binding purchase agreement and then back out.

I would still go ahead without the sale of ours. However I’d really like ours to sell and would much prefer to just transfer this existing mortgage across rather than take out a second one.

I think if you're actually willing to go ahead with the bridging loan regardless, then you may as well tell them that's what you're doing (i.e. you don't need to 'use' the bridging loan to get them off the market - you'll be using a bridging loan, unless you manage, in some absolute miracle, to get your house sale entirely done in time, which is deeply unlikely tbh).

If your plan is actually to sell, and then once you've got a buyer and your sale is well underway, to rug pull your sellers and say "okay we need to push back a bit our circumstances have changed" and then become a buyer with a chain despite having represented yourselves otherwise, just to save yourselves money, then yes YABU. But if you're not planning to do that and will actually use the bridging loan regardless then I don't see any issue with being upfront about it - they might even be willing to wait IF somehow your house sale is actually only a week or two away from completing, if they knew about it beforehand.

Surely if you buy a property using a bridging loan it’s self-evident that you are going to be trying to sell asap -that’s why they are called bridging loans.

As the seller, my concern would be you pulling out if your house didn’t sell. But I’d know that was a risk when I agreed to your offer.

We’d be doing the second really.

We can take out the second mortgage but don’t really want to due to the high costs. I would desperately try to sell our house within say 2-3 weeks and then go ahead as a chain buyer.

Only if this didn’t work out would we then go ahead with the bridging loan.

I think this sounds really dodgy - if you have an offer accepted then take 4 weeks to sell yours, you’d still be behind where you would be if you were truly chain-free.

I suppose the seller wouldn’t know we are using a bridging loan unless we told them.

And even if you found a buyer for your house first, everything might fall through.

Yeah it could do.

Sorry, you were planning on lying?!

I’d be concerned that introducing this level of opaque behaviour to a long and complex process that is based on trust to a certain degree won’t go well.

Just be open about your plan and see if they go for it.

No, but I wasn’t aware that the sellers estate agent needed to know all of the ins and outs. Surely they just need to know that I would be purchasing with a mortgage and have an agreement in principle?

Estate agents do specifically ask if you’re chain-free though, and then your conveyancer also has to understand your situation as well.

As long as you intend to push the sale through at their pace and use the bridging loan if your sale doesn’t happen then that’s fine.

Otherwise if you can hypothetically use a bridging loan- have no intention of actually doing it but will just drag your heels on the purchase, the. You are messing them around and being a dick

You need to back up your statement that you are chain-free.

If I was the seller and you'd represented yourself as chain-free, I'd not be impressed if your position changed and you had known this was going to happen- it makes you a different prospect to the seller if you're chain-free v's not.

We did exactly this. Our offer was accepted on the basis of a bridging loan, then we got an unexpected asking price offer on our house within days. We contacted the sellers, told them of our buyer but reassured them that we would still proceed with the purchase if our sale fell through. In the end it all went through seamlessly and the loan wasn’t needed.

We did.

We were totally upfront with the offer - we could buy chain free, but we were going go try and sell our house (not yet on the market) but the sales didn't need to match up, and we could buy before selling.

Just be aware if you do buy first, you also have to stump up extra stamp duty - which they will refund if you subsequently sell within a certain term - i think 2 years, possibly 3

Take the emotion out of this and treat it as a business transaction. What you’re doing is fine because you’re happy to go ahead regardless. A problem with searches or a conveyancer being really busy could easily add a few weeks to the process anyway.

Have the sellers requested cash buyer or a speedy sale or is this just you hoping to appear more attractive to a buyer?

I think if they are in a hurry this would unfair because once you inevitably involved your sale and create a chain things will drag.

The best thing you can do is get yours on the market ASAP and get it sold.

Also the potential to have ridiculously long chain vs no chain. I'd be annoyed if I thought my buyers didn't have a chain, then the ended up having one.

The sellers agent will often make enquiries and call your estate agent to establish your position. They won’t just go off your AIP, because that will only cover a portion of the purchase price. They will want to see where all of the funds will come from.

There's no problem with you attempting a fast sale if you can get it, so long as nothing that happens or fails to happen with that sale affects the timescale of the purchase. If at any point you delay things for a day/a week/a month in your purchase because of some kind of issue with your sale then you were never chain free and you lied.

It doesn't matter how attractively you market your sale house, if the person who wants to buy it is in a chain then you will cause a nightmare for the person you are buying from, unless you stick to a "chain free" timescale and go ahead with the bridging loan - if you do that then all is well.

But houses don’t sell in 4 weeks. They go under offer then it’s 3-4 months. Unless you go for cash buyers only. Even then they’d need to move fast.

As long as you are prepared to stick to a schedule that would be possible as chain free and not start messing around.

We accepted an offer from someone chain free. Then midway they decided they’d rather sell first and started stalling. We went straight back on the market at the first delay and then when they came back again we went with a different buyer as all trust was gone.