Vendor wants to put property back on the market - WWYD?

[LondonSuperTrooper]

Our vendors want to put the house back on the market as they think that we are being too slow in the house buying process. Our offer was accepted on 1 October and to date we haven?t got a mortgage offer. We had to change mortgage providers half way through the process as they kept messing us about. The estate agent and vendor were aware of this.

4 weeks after our offer was accepted the vendor threatened to put the house back on the market as no survey was carried out and they felt that we weren't committed to the property. We then hurriedly arranged a survey even though we were in between mortgage providers just to keep them happy.

I received a phone call yesterday from the EA informing that the vendors want to put the property back on the market as we've had no mortgage offer. I explained that we are doing all that we can and there isn't anything more that WE can do in order to speed up the process. The mortgage company are slow in requesting information etc.

On the legal side, the solicitor appointed by the bank has just started doing the searches and they are absolutely rubbish. EA is complaining that he can?t get hold of my solicitor ( and neither can I) as he needs to check the progress in order to report back to his client.

My colleagues said to go back to the estate agent and just ask them outright whether the vendors wants to sell us the property as they have threatened on several occasions to put the property back on the market. So what do you think? And what would you do?

Also, I have been very honest with the estate agent ? is that wise?!
Help please!

Are you pestering the mortgage company daily?

WE had our mortgage broker doing this for us. You need to hurry them up. Its not your fault, but surely you can see why its bothering the vendor?

Am on the other end of this at the moment - accepted an offer by buyers in mid October and they still haven't carried out any surveys - due to unspecified issues in getting together relevant financial statements, etc. This is holding up our offer on another property as I don't want to commit to surveys on that until I know our sale is going to progress. So, while I have some sympathy for you, I can see how difficult it must be for your vendors who presumably want to find a property to move into of their own.

If your solicitor is being overly slow, you could write a letter to them threatening to take them to the Legal Ombudsman (there is a sample letter on the LO website) - that tends to light a fire under them.

I don't blame them tbh.
It shouldn't be taking this long.

Honesty is def the best policy.

There's no way I'd have accepted your offer to be honest and I suspect your vendor is also realising the error of that way. It can now take quite a while for a mortgage to go through. There's quite a few more checks and things that they do now that they didn't just 4 yrs ago. Hindsight is a wonderful thing but wouldn't it have been better to get the offer and then search for the house? Or at least have the two overlapping rather than what sounds like find house, sort mortgage.

From your vendors perspective I would have expected the survey arranged and completed in this time frame. For a trouble free selling your looking at around 12 wks - 16wks for a sale and well you sound like you have done a good 8 wks with nothing really happening. Without the mortgage in honesty you don't have a leg to stand on. Unless that changes pronto I'm afraid you will lose this house.

If your vendors feel kind (or sensible in my view), they will keep your offer on the table, put the house on the market and only rescind the offer should a more concrete offer come in. By the sounds of it they are a bit cross though so possibly just want to move on....excuse the phrasing! House selling and buying is cut throat now, the days of it being a pleasant process is unfortunately long gone...... :(

If I was the vendor I would put the property back on the market. Who is your mortgage going to be with and why are you not using a solicitor appointed by yourselves.

Don't also forget but yor vendor probably has their eye on a property too that they are in danger of losing because their house sale isn't progressing.

Please say you're not using Countrywide. We're arranged a mortgage with HSBC & they insisted we use CW (& pay a premium for using our own too). CW waited 6 weeks to send info to our solicitor and then it was about a completely different property.
We had to extend our mortgage offer for 3 months due to CW inefficiency.

Your Vendors would be mad to pull out now. I suspect they're wishing they'd held out for a higher offer.
The EA has a responsibility to advise them properly, I'd definitely go & see them to establish what's really going on.
Fingers crossed for you.

Agree with LaCiccolina - exactly what we have done - their offer is still on the table and if they get themselves together and get the ball rolling, I will still go with them - but the house is still being marketed and if someone else comes along and is ready to go - I'm sorry, but we have to look out for ourselves in this process.

We had a similar situation earlier this year, although we were the sellers. It's probably not what you want to hear, but after 9 weeks of empty promises from the 'buyer' of it being only a matter of time until they had their mortgage sorted, not their fault, bank and solicitor being slow etc we just put the flat back on the market and told them they were welcome to get back to us when they had a mortgage in place but that we'd be considering any other offers received meanwhile.

You need to really nag your lender and solicitor daily. Whilst you might be doing all you think you can, that's not really any consolation to vendors who are clearly getting nervous, want shot of their house and don't want to find out after Christmas that you've been turned down for a mortgage and all the time they've been off the market for you has been wasted. Can you get a timescale from your lender, take that back to your EA and tell them to let the vendors know you're serious about buying, will they please give you until X date whilst you hassle your end, before re-marketing.

There's not much you can do except chase your mortgage broker.

Thanks for the feedback. The vendors are not in a chain and neither are we. I guess that the vendors accepted our lower offer simply because they wanted to sell the property ASAP. Maybe they are kicking themselves for accepting our low offer?

I do keep calling mortgage provider (no broker - we arranged it ourselves) on a daily basis and am told conflicting information by whoever picks up the phone. We were told that a mortgage offer is imminent last Wednesday. Yet Thursday afternoon they called us to say that our online statements are unacceptable even though they've had this paperwork for the last 3 weeks All that I got last week is that all paperwork is in order and the mortgage underwriter will look at the application later on today etc. I blew a gasket on Thursday when they dropped that bombshell on me

Can I just add that the property was on the market for 5 months before our offer was accepted. We have written directly to the vendor to show our commitments etc as we are very keen but judging by your responses i may need to resign myself to losing the house

Right I'm off to console myself with lots of

Our mortgage is with Nationwide and they have appointed the solicitor.

And they are paying for the legal fees. Maybe saving £1500 by not using our own solicitor is not such a great thing?

Furthermore, the EA says that the vendor will NOT reduce the price at all following on from the survey. I just think that they are being unreasonable!

The house needs new guttering, new rewiring, have asbestos ceiling and doors & needs new garage frame. This was not anticipated when we put our offer in. We budgeted for new boiler, bathroom, carpet and radiators.

Even if Nationwide are paying the fees, the solicitors still owe you a duty of care to progress matters on your behalf as you are their client. I would suggest sending a letter saying that you will report them to the Legal Ombudsman unless they start returning your and the estate agent's calls and generally progressing matters at a satisfactory rate.

Lots of surveys come back with problems and say but the price is ok and reflects these issues. Hence why buyers who automatically want more money off because of a survey are sometimes cheeky to the seller. Sounds like they accepted an offer already lower than they hoped for on a fixer upper because you we're chain free and could move quickly. You've now taken at least twice as long and STILL don't have a mortgage and are already talking about wanting even more off from the survey!? I think you should tell them to put it back on the market if you're so confident it's overpriced and no one else will buy it. That way when you do sort out your mortgage and you come back to them, they will have seen they're not getting any better offers and will accept yours more happily (and be open to negotiate more based on surveys.)

Good to have all of your opinions. I guess that there's nothing that I can do but wait for the mortgage offer. If it goes back on the market, then so be it.

I'm a firm believer in what will be will be. Maybe we are just not destined to buy that house!

I would hassle my mortgage provider, but also communicate to the vendor that they are perfectly at liberty to put the property back on the market. But check, does this mean they will not sell to you?
There is no guarantee if they put it back on the market that anyone else will offer, it has already been on the market for 5 months. Even if they do, they may well not be in a position to proceed before you do.

This could be an EA hassling you (maybe they want to commission sooner rather than later); rather than the vendor. Have you spoken to your solicitor? Ours once told us to start looking at properties again when a vendor was slow to get the process moving. (We have a Nationwide mortgage and were never even offered their solicitor, but the local company we used were very very good, well worth their money).

I have been hassling the lender, I call them every day sometimes twice in a day. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to make a difference at all as I speak to different advisers every time I call. I can't do more than that as I'm trying to juggle a full time job at the same time as well as the school runs etc.

For us saving £1.5k by not using our solicitor is a huge amount of money. We have thrown everything we have into the deposit fund so that we can buy our first family home. And now on top of that, we have to find around £8k to rectify all the faults that the survey has thrown up.

In a way I feel that if she puts it back on the market, then the decision is made for us and we can walk away....

Why walk away? You do realise that until you have exchange contracts there is nothing to stop her showing other people around. If she has had buyers drop out at the last minute before she might even be wise to do so.

However, her putting it back on the market doesn't mean it will sell to anyone else.

A story: when pregnant with DC2 we saw a bigger house we wanted to buy, we put in an offer, it was accepted subject to ours being sold. Pretty soon we had an offer on ours, from someone with no chain (she was moving overseas), everything firmed up, the vendors took their house off the market.

Things were going fine, then our buyer had to pull out, he company forced her to move overseas much faster than expected.
Our Vendor then said they had to put their house back on the market. We were fine about this. However I only gave it (mentally I didn't tell anyone) two weeks for us to find another buyer; because by then it would be getting too close to my due date.
They found an alternative buyer, and we said fine! And put off moving for another year. I went on to have my baby, and we moved about a year later, to a different house in an even better location.

However the original house was back on the market by then, they had had at least one more buyer drop out.

With houses you need to not get panicked into decisions, especially by estate agents. If it needs £8000 of work maybe its not the right house. Even if she puts it back on the market it might not sell. Have you formally lowered your offer? (I would do this only when you have your mortgage in place.)
Have you kept looking for any other houses which come up?

If you don't proceed will you still be liable to some solicitors fees?
I wonder if you have a case for complaint..if they'd acted with more speed you wouldn't be in this position.

London I am sorry to see you are still having problems.

If I am honest as a vendor I would definately be getting jittery and debating putting the house back on the market. You know me though, impatient.

If I were you I would be walking into a Nationwide branch now and demanding to be seen by someone who can sort this mess out. This is ridiculous.

At this rate, yes, I'd expect them to put it back on the market.

The best I can say is, once you finally have this mortgage approved (perhaps after Christmas, at this rate!) your next house purchase should go a bit quicker.

For future reference, online statements are almost never accepted, unless they've stated otherwise. You need to request statements from your bank, and they will be posted to you (branches won't print the official statements).

That having been said, a friend of mine just had a mortgage approved by Nationwide, and they also managed to stuff up his paperwork. They claimed he hadn't sent something in, which he found in the envelope with the other paperwork they sent back to him. Added an extra week or more to the process.

We're paying our solicitor about £1500 which includes both the sale and buying (if we ever find a house to buy), this excludes the stamp duty we'll also pay to them.

We are also with Nationwide and have been to see a personal mortgage advisor, for whom we have the number, and have been in contact directly with her on a number of occasions.

I'd say that you need to demand the number of one person to deal with from Nationwide and also look around at other solicitors.

Yes if we do not proceed we are liable for the search fees, circa £300. Lets not forget the mortgage arrangement fees for the two mortgages, our previous solicitor costs and the full structural survey.

Also, in response to the earlier comments, we had a mortgage agreement in principle before we started house hunting. Furthermore, we are looking for houses around £150k less than what the mortgage lender is willing to offer us. Hence we thought that getting a mortgage would be the least of our worries. Guess we were so naive!!

Wizard we have gone to the local Nationwide branch. They were v sorry for the problems they we are having but they can't help us as we applied for the mortgage over the phone.

green well they've lost our initial application do your friends exp sounds v similar to ours.