SE London - will my buyers be patient whilst we house hunt?

[sellotape12]

Hello! We're selling our 2 bed in East Dulwich (sniff) and on the lookout for a 3 bed house as nearby as poss. We have reasonably to ordinary budget, lets say.

However, I'd love to know how long it took other second steppers to find somewhere? There's a shortage of period housing stock in the area, and I'm worried our first timers will get bored of our search... any advice or stories welcome!

Sadie

We sold a two bed in east dulwich last year. We didn't take very long (a few weeks ish) to find a new place but after about 8 weeks that fell through. Our buyers were buying to rent out and they were very patient. We couldn't find anywhere soonish so our buyers asked if we could exchange soon so they knew it definitely was going to happen - fair enough! In the end we exchanged with a completion date 3 months ish later but had an agreement that we could complete earlier by mutual agreement. We were going to rent if we had to but fortunately we bought our house off someone else who's chain had fallen through so we were in a hurry too. So we brought the completion forward on our flat. It really does depend on your buyers and what position they're in. It's a stressful time!

Oh gosh! Sorry it was so stressful. May I ask why your original choice fell through? So many horror stories are coming to light

We found our house, put our flat (2 bed ED circa 2013) on the market - soon as we had an offer - which was less than 24 hours, we made an offer. We had people buy ours who were intending to rent it out so they were fairly patient as we were in a chain and the people who lived in our house now had lived here for 50 years and moving abroad so everything was softly softly slowly slowly.

We ended up pulling out of a sale because the vendors kept us hanging on so long - 6 months in the end. The main problem was that house prices were going up and up in the mean time and we knew that our buying power for other places was steadily decreasing - in the end we had to cut our losses. Wish we'd had a vendor like seven though - we would have been perfectly happy with a long period between exchange and completion, but couldn't even get our vendors to exchange.

Hi our buyers have waited six months for us and we just exchanged the other week. They offered on ours in late September, we found a property in October, all going very quickly but that fell through (not our fault) in December. We asked do they want to wait and they said yes - we found the new property late Jan. They are in rented so not such a problem with them waiting. I think it depends on the circumstances of your eventual buyer, if they have a big chain behind them they won't be so relaxed.

Surely it depends on their specific situation? If their lease is up they will want to move in asap, so if you dither for months they may lose patience. Similarly, if they're buying to rent, or if they can extend their lease month-to-month and aren't in a hurry they may be patient.

To answer your question our original purchase fell through as the seller decided he wanted to rent out the house rather than sell! We hated him for quite a while, especially as he just stopped answering the phone to his estate agent or solicitor so didn't actually pass on that he'd decided that! We moved to Kent so neither that house nor our current one were in east dulwich. I do miss ed!