How long is reasonable to wait for vendor to find a property?

[Turnipinatutu]

We have buyers for our house. A lovely couple we know, who are completing on their property and renting short term from friends.
They have said they'd ideally like to be in by Christmas but we just can't find anything to buy!
They know the situation and have mentioned looking for a short term holiday let if we can't move by Christmas.

They are very keen on our house and mentioned trying to exchange ASAP and leaving the completion date to be arranged. Something we won't be doing.

We can't move unless we find something and can't consider rented, as we're porting our current mortgage deal.
I'm worried the (slow) market will grind to a halt soon and we will be left waiting for things to pick up in the spring.

So how long is reasonable? They've said they definately want our house and we would love them to have it! But I feel like we're keeping them (and ourselves) dangling on a piece of string.

if it were me and you hadn't found anything by Christmas, I'd be looking around elsewhere.

We are slightly in this position, love the house, but won't wait for the vendors forever. So you will need to decide how likely your house is to sell again, and how much you really want to move. I definitely won't be waiting until spring.

Have you spoken to your mortgage company? I know in some cases they will let you rent for 6 months or so and still be able to port, they just sort of suspend it.

Mmm...this is sort of what I thought. I know they won't wait forever and wouldn't expect them to.
I think if we lose these buyers we may well give up until the market wakes up a bit.

We've viewed all the possible houses that are on the market at the moment and nothing comes close yet, apart from one that is overpriced and declined our low offer (still on the market at the moment though)
So really we are waiting for new listings and leaflet dropping anything we like the look of.
We are in limbo and so are our poor buyers.

Summer is slow - I've waited to put a flat on until next week. I think you might find a lot more stuff coming through in yhe next few weeks. Good luck.

We successfully got buyers to wait for about 5 months once, but the EA wasn't happy and I think the buyers would have walked if it had been much longer.

I hope so.
I don't think we're being too fussy. The location and garden size is important, but pretty much everything else is flexible. We're also prepared to buy something that needs work or would need extending to suit us, as long as the price is right.
Our area of search is only about 5 miles or so though.

Yes our lenders gave us up to 6 months grace on porting the mortgage.

These boots- 5 months! Wow...I take it there was no chain?

I think it just depends on how much they want the house really. If they think there's not going to be anything else to go for in quite awhile (if they don't buy your house) they may be prepared to wait longer.
I was amazed that the couple in yesterday's Location Location Location said they would happily wait 8 months for the house they wanted.

We offered in Jan and completed four weeks ago, because, like you, there was nothing else that we even wanted to view in the 7 months so we were prepared to wait.

But we had to move into rented to keep our buyers, the rental was twice our mortgage, our buyers were not only slow to find somewhere but then incredibly slow with the whole mortgage thing, so we failed to get school applications in and found out last week that we missed the school place too... The total of cost of waiting for us was thousands but I'm in denial. You have to take the longer view I think.

Hopefully the market that your buyers are looking at won't change much (ie they won't find another house that's more procedable). I'm surprised you can't pause or redeem your mortgage early though

I think it's impossible to say how long you'd wait, because it depends on so many things.

However, surely they must be in much the same position as you (ie nothing much coming onto the market)?

No, no chain, we eventually rented for a while to give us a bit longer to look. It was a massive hassle at the time but now we are in the right house, it all seemed worth it in retrospect.

The good thing is, we know our buyers, so we're in contact on the phone to keep each other up to speed on the situation. They'll be renting from friends in the village from mid October, so I've said they can call round whenever they need to once here.

There must be a house out there for us. We just need somebody to move out of it!