Urgent help please!

[Wineandpopcorn]

Due to exchange this afternoon, and solicitors have just let us know that our buyers are only giving 5% deposit instead of the requested 10%. This means if they pull out before completion we are liable to pay the difference to both our buyers and sellers. Is this normal? What the hell should we do?? .

You pay your solicitor to advise you - ask them what the potential repercussions are. How much money are we talking about and how has this change come about? I'd be concerned that if 5% is a relatively small sum there's a danger they might not complete. They should be asking if this is okay not telling you this is what you are getting.

They won't answer the phone . The deposit should be £20,000 and they are offering £10,000. I am completely clueless as to what it all means and was wondering if this happens all the time?

I think it's very unlikely that they will walk away post-exchange. If you can't get through to your solicitor, ask your EA how many clients have not completed on properties they have exchanged on - I am sure the answer will make you a little less stressed . I agree your solicitor should have given you a heads-up though.

Okay so if you can't get hold of your solicitor get on to the EA to find out for you why the buyers have done this. Normally for something like this I'd expect the EA to be in the know and trying to find out what's going on. I'm guessing today's completions are taking up the solicitor's time.

We had this, on day of exchange they offered us £1,000 which was just under 1% deposit because someone at the bottom of the chain was on an assisted buy scheme so presumably everyone below had had to accept a lower deposit. Our solicitor advised us not to accept such a low deposit and we asked our buyer to pay up. They came back with 7.5% our solicitor said this was better and asked them to confirm that they would be able to make this up to 10% in the event of default which was agreed. Our solicitor said that we should be OK to proceed as in 40 years she had only had 3 fail to complete and we had most of the deposit up front. It all went through fine.

All sorted and contracts exchanged! Thank you for all the advice .