To cut a very long story short, we exchanged contracts on a conversion property with a very reputable company in April 2016 with an expected completion date of Winter 2016. We were put under great pressure to exchange in order to reserve the property and so sold our house at a discounted price to secure a quick sale. We had no idea that completion would not be when we were told it would be when we exchanged.
We are cash buyers by the way so no mortgage involved.
Luckily for us, we also own a rental property which fell vacant at that time so we were able to move in to until our new home was ready - for an anticipated 6 months max. If we hadn't had this property we'd have been well and truly on our uppers by now.
Since then we have had the following updates on delays
In June 2016 we were told completion would be Feb 17
In Dec 16 told July 17
In Jan 17 told Sept 17
In April 17 told Dec 17
Latest forecast is Nov 17 - a whole year after we were expecting, though we haven't a whole lot of faith in this date any more!
Obviously this has caused immense personal problems especially as there were family reasons why we wanted to move (to a City about 100 miles away from where we are now)
Quite apart from these, the financial implications have been huge -
- We have lost £1100 a month in rental income as we are still in the property we normally rent out
- we lost at least £10000 by having to sell our old house so quickly
- the 10% deposit ( £50000 approx) has been sitting in their bank account all this time, with the remainder of the proceeds in our bank earning very little interest. Had we known it would be delay of a year we could made a long term investment, but the drip feeding has meant we had to keep the money available in case it was needed.
We have had a few meetings with the company but they were very unsatisfactory, we've been offered 5k goodwill guest urge (and given a Christmas hamper and short stay in a local hotel around Christmas last year as we expected to be with our family by then)
Would it be reasonable to expect a more realistic compensation package? If so what would would be the best way to pursue this?
Many thanks for reading this far, I'd be very grateful for any response, as you can imagine, it's been a very difficult and frustrating time for us.