Anyone fancy starting a Sellers support thread?

[Sooperswooper]

Just that really!

Oh Polyethyl that sounds so stressful, do you have to pay a deposit to removal firm?

I am set on a newbuild near us but we have to exchange six weeks after reserving and that won't happen so I have lost that.

That is really annoying Poly.

Yes, the Easter thing is mightily inconvenient. I'm not sure we're close to exchange (there a weird perspective thing around close to exchange where it looks both close yet infinitely far away at the same time). We may be close to having our bloody offer accepted! Then we get to start our mortgage, have a survey, do the searches and queries and back and forth with solicitors dance and then (hopefully) exchange. Our buyers have done the mortgage and are starting on the searches so that the back and forth queries dance can commence on that side.

The vendors need to hurry up and accept the offer though, so that we can start the whole mortgage rigmarole. Both DH and I are going to be away all next week (work stuff) so we can't actually get down to the bank to sit for hours doing it all (we're porting so there's no shopping around involved) until a week on Tuesday anyway. That'll be a joy with jet lag. Or it might take longer to get an appointment because banks are just like that. At least our bank are reputed to be pretty quick on the whole mortgages thing (they were previously).

Peace: you might not lose it. Developers pretend to be inflexible to make you feel like you have to snap their hand off or someone else will rush in and buy it. But actually, it's never as urgent as they make out.

Also, they often have schemes to help you sell or offer part exchange (they'll rip you off at both ends on part exchange though). We looked into part exchange previously - they offered us £40k less than we would have got for this house on the open market (even at that point) and wanted to charge us £50k more than they eventually sold the house we were interested in for with no extras whatsoever. It was not a good deal. They also threw the house up super quickly and driving past it now you can see there are serious issues with the build quality.

You are probably right Step, I am panicking a bit as we are renting and the landlord is selling up, so we could be given two months notice at any time. Newbuild with no chain sounds so attractive and there is not much around near us that isn't utterly hideous. Oh well, I hope we all get a couple of days off for Easter.

I didn't realise you were still waiting for the offer to be accepted.

Sadly yes. It's a bloody nightmare. The sellers are a bit odd, and we'd probably have run in the other direction if the market wasn't all tumbleweeds and seriously overpriced and/or otherwise awful houses round here (sounds like yours is the same).

Step - I moved from BT (have always stuck to them) to TalkTalk. Have now cancelled my TalkTalk order after spending 2 hours on the phone to them this morning and gone back to BT. BT tested the speed on my line and reckon they can offer me fibre - the open reach engineers thought not. We will see. All the same I will not have anything until 6th April.

What a bucket load of stress on this thread - I can't think of any other time in our lives that we have to put up with such rubbish!

Poly - when I moved last week I had to pay the removal firm the full amount 7 working days in advance. I am not sure if it was moveable at all because I didn't check as I was moving into rented.

Peace - the added dimension of the landlord selling up is even more stress isn't it. I have seen my brother move more than twice because of the same thing. When we decided to rent (because I couldn't face buying and selling at the same time) just now I restricted my search to houses owned by 'commercial' landlords, like big country estates and charities because I would really hate to have to move, especially when schools are in the picture. Awful.

For those who've accepted offers recently - did you get ridiculously stressed before the survey?
It's not that I think there's anything wrong with our house (that I know of!), but it has been on the market for so long, and houses just don't move fast round here, that any potential problem or under valuation, and the sale goes kaput...I just can't face the prospect of putting it back on the market, but we NEED to move.

It will have been 7 weeks since we accepted the offer, and I'm noticing every little crack and mark in the place: my blood pressure is rising all the time.
We can't do anything about the area we live (which is fine, but not fancy), or the landlords dumping their houses on the cheap in the roads around us, but previous house sales in the area affect the valuation right? I'm see-sawing between panicking that the surveyor will pick up on some problem with the house that we didn't know we had, or that they'll look at some of the house prices in the properties that have sold around us and tell the mortgage company that the price the buyers have offered (which is 5 grand under the asking price already) is too much.

Does anybody else have any experiences of selling in the less than buoyant North-West property market?

Yes I had that feeling before the surveyor came. Our house is very old. We got a builder friend round beforehand and fixed anything that could come up in the survey. The survey came back fine and raised no issues as we had pre-empted any possible problems.

My dad's a builder! He says it's fine, and he can't see any potential issues. It's just there in the pit of my stomach...the prospect of moving has been hanging over us for so long now, and now we're finally in the home stretch, I just keep thinking something's going to go wrong. Of course once we're sold then I'll be lurking around stressing on the Buyer's thread - this whole moving thing has turned me into a basket case: never again! I hate this. Why does it have to be so difficult?

I understand exactly what you are saying Jjou. I found the surveyors very stressful, in fact I went out and left DH to it! We knew 2 things would come up and were up front with the buyer from the start - flat roof and trees in the garden. Neither actually were a problem, but were a surveyors favourite fault to mention. And they did!

We are buying a much older house, but have gutted two even older, so we know what old houses are like - old! Only one of the red flags concerns us and even then we only want to know how much work is in putting it right!

How is everyone?

Still haven't exchanged here and my agent is being a bit odd! They love my buyer, keep telling me how wonderful they are and how much they have been doing this week ..... after causing a lengthly delay to suit themselves. We signed our contracts more than a month ago!

Emailed me to say that my buyer would be viewing again this weekend (EA has a key as of two days ago), err, no they won't be because our friends are there (we are in a holiday destination), I expect to be asked rather than told - bloody cheek.

Apparently we will be exchanging on Monday - time will tell, we are absolutely sick of it. My EA has been very rude about my solicitor, insisting my buyer's solicitor has been fab, however when I called my solicitor about exchanging he hadn't heard anything from the other side at all, for days. My buyer's buyer wasn't ready to go even today after we were told that they were in a position to exchange a month ago.

No idea why people are not just upfront about their position. I wasn't prepared to think anything but good things about my agent but they have done very little for rather a lot of money.