Situation:
Offer accepted on a house we love in July (we accepted an offer on ours in March). At the time vendor hadn't found a property and only just had their offer accepted couple of weeks ago. They vendor of the property they are buying is buying a new build and had put down a 10% deposit. We previously said to our buyers buyer (our buyers don't seem to be putting a lot of pressure but their buyer who is an investor is) that we would vacate our property by the end of August (we were pushed to the wall to say this really as we didnt want to lose the sale of our property but at the time our vendor hadn't found one). However, now things have changed and we can see top of the chain so would be ideal to align our sale and purchase but despite several emails, vendor has refused to commit to an exchange/completion date and is adamant that they wouldn't split their sale/purchase. One option for us would be to rent but we cannot find any short term lets and airbnb costs are outrageous and without a clear idea of timescales for the onward chain from us, airbnb isn't really an option. If we have to rent, it would be in the current area we are living as we can't face changing daughter's school twice if we rent close to where we are buying and our purchase falls through, we don't want to have to rent for >6 months either. So this will mean commuting to work (which is reason we are moving) and this will take 2 hours each way. Vendor has said that they are keen to move things quickly but can't commit to a date and has today requested through their EA no further direct contact with them which is a bit worrying
Questions are:
- Do we threaten to pull out to see if they can agree a completion date? We have suggested end of September but could work with end of October which to my mind is reasonable enough and fits well with the current timescales to completion of 16-20 weeks. Just worried that they could turn round after later and decide not to go ahead with the sale without some firm commitment (their previous sale fell through as they couldn't find a property within the timescale of their buyers)
- Are we being unrealistic with suggesting that we agree on an exchange/completion date now? All the paperwork for our purchase is ready, just one thing outstanding which was sorted yesterday.
- We have booked a survey for next Wednesday (we were waiting for our vendors to find a property before doing this), do we go ahead or wait a little bit given that it is unlikely that we will be in a position to complete in the next 8 (or 12) weeks, hopefully not for longer! We don't want to spend too much if we can, just in case.
- How do we keep our buyers and their buyer happy - suspect their patience is running out but life would be SO MUCH easier if we could align our sale and purchase.
- Our mortgage offer expires early November. While we could reapply, it just feels wrong having to do this for the current property since the offer expiring won't be due any fault of ours but just because the vendor isn't able to proceed in reasonable time and wont split their sale/purchase.
Any thoughts/suggestion will be highly appreciated.
Thanks