Due diligence

[Bluevelvetsofa]

When selling a house, what does or should due diligence involve?

We were told that a potential buyer of our property was due to exchange the week after they made an offer on our house and complete the following week. We accepted the offer on the basis that they were proceedable, but it turned out ten weeks later that they, in fact, hadn’t exchanged on their property at all.

i would have expected that due diligence on the part of the estate agent and conveyancer, would have discovered this.

This is EXACTLY what happened to us three years ago!

Village property, we used a small, local EA and the solicitor he recommended (who as it turns out, was his partner).
Offer accepted after just one day of viewings but as the weeks rolled by it looked (to us) that our "chain free, FTB with mortgage offer agreed" was not all they seemed to be.
We kept pushing to go with a different buyer but the EA was insistent that these were just glitches and it would all go through "very soon".
On the day we had been told we were going to exchange it transpired that our buyer had still not exchanged on their sale(!). Roll forward a few weeks when we were again expecting to exchange, it turned out that they had only just applied for their mortgage and that had been refused(!).

We did sell eventually but the whole thing was incredibly stressful and all brought about by our EA lying and being lazy.
Even on the day of completion (we had already moved out into another property by then) they were "unavailable" to collect the keys so I had to drive several miles to them instead.

In hindsight we should have been more insistent and not so believing of their (obvious) lies but we had not sold for thirty years so the whole process was a mystery to us.
When we sold another house a few months later we were much more savvy plus we went with an EA & solicitor who were much more on the ball.

Until exchange has taken place nothing is cast in stone.

My daughter and husband selling their first home and buying second were in a short chain. Their place sold to a first time buyer and the vendor of the new place was buying from executors.

They were working away and left the house on Monday expecting to exchange that week. Left place in a bit of a mess as they'd clean up before completion.

Buyer pulled out on Tuesday quoting some bollox about the windows.

When I went down shortly after to ensure the place met insurance rules and spent the weekend getting it ship shape for viewings.

They were in danger of losing the purchase their heart was set on. Fortunately my partner and I and her husband's parents between us were in a position to lend enough to them that they could bridge over.

@Bromptotoo "Until exchange has taken place nothing is set in stone"

Agree but I think the OP is asking about the EA making sure the prospective buyer is in the position they say they are.
In our case, the EA knew the buyer was not in a position to proceed yet kept stringing us along and blatantly lying to us (at the begining and throughout the whole process).

When you accepted the offer the buyer was in the process of selling their own house but hadn’t yet exchanged contracts - the estate agent would only be able to check that that was the case, which I presume it was?
It’s very common for buyers and sellers to be told that contracts will be exchanged by x date but any number of things can derail that and nothing is fixed until those contracts have actually been exchanged, so those sorts of predictions are best-guess estimates and nothing more.
As far as I understand it, provided your buyer has found a buyer for their own property, they are in a position to proceed, even if they haven’t exchanged on their own sale. I can’t see what more the agent could have done?

@Annie098 that's really what I was wanting to know. The agent suggested we accept the offer because ‘you won’t find buyers in such a good position’. Presumably then, the due diligence didn’t show that exchange and completion wasn’t going to happen as they said. We were told and presumably the agents were too, that the buyers were moving in with family whilst waiting for completion on our house. This clearly wasn’t the case and someone, somewhere has been economical with the truth.

It’s all academic now anyway, because they aren’t in a position to exchange; we are, but we’ve lost the house we were purchasing, so that’s that. My feeling is that it’s as @Bromptotoo says- the agents have known all along and have been stringing us along.