Sorry it’s very long but will really appreciate if anyone has any ideas.
My husband and I agreed to buy a mobile home in January this year. We needed planning permission to live in it full time on our property and we offered to pay a deposit while we waited for this with the assurance from the seller that it would be returned if we did not get the permission granted. Seller suggested £5,000 which we paid.
It took a while but finally at the end of June we did get the permission granted but the seller was not ready to move the mobile home because its exit route from her property required a hedge to be removed which needed landowner permission and council permission. They never told us this until after we got our planning granted, and then we found out that they hadn’t even applied to the council for hedge removal for weeks after our permission was granted. (Back in January when we went to see it we had been assured it was a straightforward task to relocate the home.)
11 weeks passed from our planning approval with no signs of movement and in that time we have been beyond stressed, as this was to be our permanent home and our rental lease was expiring so we were worried about the roof over our heads. Throughout this time we were always calling and emailing asking for updates of the situation and we always got knocked back with false assurances that it would be happening ‘any time now’.
We decided we needed to get a plan B lined up which we did and last week we made the decision to proceed with this alternative as we could not afford to lose any more time or money waiting with no certainty or date about when the mobile home would be with us.
We have incurred a lot of costs waiting for this mobile home: The week of our permission grant we paid for the seller’s associate to do groundworks for us for the mobile home as we wanted to move onto site ASAP, which seller knew, and we had no reason to delay as nobody had mentioned anything about a hedge at this point and we had basically been told they’d be ready to go whenever we were. We have also had to delay some other developments while waiting for this and so will be a
paying higher prices now as costs continue to rise. We have also been paying a very expensive rent so have stacked up costs during this ongoing process and we feel returning the deposit is the least they can do.
When we had decided on our plan B I phoned the seller’s agent and told him we would not be continuing with the purchase and I advised him we would be asking for our deposit back. I then sent a follow up email explaining our reasons in more detail and requesting our deposit be returned. This email was sent on Monday evening and I have not heard anything back yet.
Unfortunately there was never any contract signed, it was all verbally agreed and some emails sent. Can anyone suggest what we can do next If we don’t hear back from them. I would love to avoid court etc if possible but it may be the only way.
thanks for reading