In a Chain Support Thread Nov2017

[YogaDrone]

Congrats to those who have exchanged and are moving soon.

Fingers crossed to those hoping to exchange soon.

Come vent your property chain based frustrations and joys here.

Previous thread is HERE

Congrats Zoe! Hope all goes smoothly.

Cats have they given you a full and formal offer? If they have then there's no reason why they should ask for any additional information.

Lazy- it's a full and final offer, issued a couple of months ago. Apparently lenders can request additional info between exchange-completion and with our offer being issued months ago, I'm bricking it in case they ask for another payslip at my former salary...

I would have thought it's unlikely. Does your new salary affect the affordability of the new mortgage? If not then try not to worry. If it does then it might be worth having a chat with a mortgage broker and getting them in place as a back-up in case you need to reapply.

We've used London & County and they have been absolutely brilliant all the way though, so I would recommend them.

Thanks Tiglet ; of course my property is not found in search on fensa website ... I don't understand all this, never sold a house before, didn't know I'd need to keep receipts for every chuffin' home expense over the last 16 years!!! Do solicitors really not allow people to proceed to buy on matters like this??

And the whole thing yawns to a grinding halt now til 1st week in Jan anyway.

Congratulations Zoe hope everything goes smoothly for you today

Cats, as usual I agree with Lazy - we haven't had to prove any salary details since the application, however, if the lender considers it a "material change" they will want to know about it so it might be worth checking the small print of the offer or chatting to your broker.

jober do you have the building regs cert for the new door? If I were you I'd provide the receipt and the building regs cert and tell your solicitor you don't have a fensa cert because the company went bust and let him/her advise whether you need to do any more. The purchasers solicitor will ask for the moon on a stick but that doesn't mean that all of what they ask for is necessary

I posted a while ago when my chain came to a crashing end just before exchange. A couple of days later the house we were trying to buy was sold to someone else and I was gutted to say the least.

But, we kept going and managed to get a new buyer and find another house. The process continued with alot of ups and downs - our buyers survey on our house was pretty horrific and I'm surprised our house was still standing given all the alleged issues! Managed to get to exchange but more drama which meant we ended up taking a gamble and exchanging with our buyer and breaking the chain in the hope our purchase would go through in the next couple of days. It was VERY stressful as we thought we had essential left ourselves homeless. After more drama with some very difficult solicitors we got there and we have now have a sold house a new house to move to and a completion date in January.

I'm now allowing myself to get excited about the move - although the house is a 'project' so lots more stress to come I'm sure. Just wanted to say there is hope! Reading this thread helped so much knowing we weren't alone.

Good luck to everyone for the new year

Thought I'd stop by and say hi, been really busy at work lately and its been great to concentrate 100% on something else for a change

zoe congrats hon, wishing you the very best in your new home.

Dorris i could not agree with you more. It took us 9 months and 3 attempts to get to exchange. We did end up homeless after the 1st one fell through and i thought it would never happen for us. We now too complete in Jan.

To those who hoped for a pre Xmas exchange, dont feel too despondent if it didnt happen. The new year will bring good things im sure.

Good luck to all of you and have a wonderful Xmas and new year.

This group is amazing. Thank you for all the kindness when i needed it.

Xxx

cats we were asked for further pay slips, I think it was 3 months (maybe more) since the first ones had been provided and we were buying a different house to the one we'd initially been approved for, if that makes sense.

I haven't got a building regs cert for a new front door. I had I idea in 2015 that I would have needed one!! Am i not gonna be able to sell my house because of this??

That should read I had no idea

Hi all,

Congrats to those who have made progress and commiserations to those who wanted to be in by Christmas but are now not going to make it. Hope you're not too disappointed.

Got our homebuyers survey today on the house we are buying. Pretty happy with it overall. It says that the boiler in the house is old (we knew that already) and that the loft needs additional insulation and there's some external pipe work that needs insulating to prevent the pipes freezing. But overall nothing horrendous, so happy to proceed at the agreed asking price. They did say though to make sure to get our solicitors get buildings reg certification for the garage conversion / downstairs loo that has been put in. I guess I need to show the report to our solicitor but they shut at midday today for the Christmas break so nothing I can do until January now. So on that note, I wish all you ladies a lovely Christmas and hope we all manage stress free completions in the New Year.

Job You have two choices; either get in touch with the local council now and put an application in for sign-off. If the work doesn't meet the regs then you'll have to make it good and bring it up to the standard required in order to get approval. Or when you come to sell, you'll need to purchase an indemnity policy to cover your buyer - which in the evert of enforcement actions being taken against them, will cover their costs and expenses.

We had a new front door through Yale doors and when I was looking for all our paperwork I found that we had been emailed a warranty certificate. Not sure if that helps but mentioning it in case.

Thanks guys. I'm just so pissed off that it seems I won't be able to sell my house without spending hundreds more £ for superfluous certification! !!

Hi @jobergamot - you only need a FENSA certificate if the door is at least 50% glazed.

Indemnity insurance policies (if you should have had a FENSA cert but don't have one) are fairly cheap - they work on a scale depending upon your house value but can be as little as £15 and under

Hi all - still here, still rushing about frantically trying to galvanise people despite the fact that it's Christmas.

Am tired, skint, stressed and fed up. I have no tree because our decorations are in storage. I am looking at bare walls and shelves because - you guessed it - that stuff's in storage too...

Hope everyone else is OK and that progress is being made.

Happy New Year to you all

I also am tired, skint and rather bemused. Although we do have a tree so I guess that's something!

Now that everyone is back at work we asked for some clarity on why we didn't exchange before Christmas and what needs to happen. We now have a different, equally unbelievable story Current/new story is that the purchasers had hoped to indemnify against not having a local search done ( WTF? ) and, instead of saying no to this two months ago, the mortgage lender decides to say no at the point of exchange. So, presumably, the purchaser has an indemnity insurance that is worthless, or didn't get one at all and hoped no-one would notice.

We have told our Vendor this via his EA (bearing in mind our purchaser works for Vendor's EA) so I'm sort of hoping lovely vendor goes ballistic. I am certainly unimpressed and am happy to hold his coat for him while he throws his toys around. You'd think someone "in the trade", as our purchaser is, would realise that some searches are essential

Oh well.... waiting to hear how long we're delayed by this fuck up now.

Oh Yoga. What is wrong with these people?

Wish I had happier news. Our solicitor is now insisting on an essential consent being obtained. The only problem is that it's not possible to obtain it because the law that it applies to didn't exist at the time the house was built. You would have thought this was a no-brainer, but no, they are refusing to proceed without it.

I am so, so fucking done with this. I am tired of crying. I am tired of my stomach constantly churning. I am tired of not being able to sleep because of worrying. I am just tired. Every time a problem comes up, we deal with it. But we are running out of fucking time and now my own solicitor is causing problems. This stupid system is a fucking farce. Literally the only people who win from it are the lawyers.

Hi Yoga & Lazy. Happy new year to you both, & everyone on here! So sorry to hear the fuckery continues & you still cannot progress to exchange.

Still on the starting blocks again here. Had two ridiculous offers of 370k. House was reduced when we remarketed it when sale fell through from 425k to offers over 400k, so is definitely priced to sell, yet people still take the piss. Don't know how much longer our vendors will hold off in remarketing their house. On the plus side, the new year is bringing about many more hits on our house online, but this hasn't converted to more viewings as yet!

Surely it won't be too much longer?

Isn't that exact type of scenario why indemnity exists Lazy? I mean, to cover these aspects that can't be provided. How bloody frustrating for you. Your solicitor should be offering you a means to resolution though. What's your inclination now? Start looking again? Is your purchaser still happy to wait. I'm so sorry to hear this is happening to you. After your previous experience I had hoped this one would be smooth and simple

Hi Pixie. I feel your pain - this is the situation we were in and I was just as low and frustrated as you are. We ended up accepting over £50k less than our previous offer with our current purchaser!

I'm glad you are getting more clicks now that the Xmas lull is over though. I saw a headline in the Times a couple of days ago where a survey had said that people were optimistic about 2018 and thought house prices would rise. My experience is like your though - price drop after price drop and houses remaining on the market which look really well priced and would have been snapped up a year ago.

I'm glad your vendor is sticking with you. The way we managed to take a low offer was in collaboration with our vendors. They dropped their price and we were then able to drop ours. Is your vendor amendable to a similar deal perhaps?

Fingers crossed those clicks translate to viewings and offers

Sorry to hear about your delays Lazy, Yoga and Pixie- hoping you receive good news soon.

We've told our FA to inform the bank of my job/pay change (she already knew but thought we should stay quiet?!) and have accepted that we won't be buying our 'dream' house after all as our affordability goes down (despite being able to make mortgage repayments comfortably). Oh well! I'd expected to feel devastated/crushed but in actual fact, I'm the complete opposite! I've had the best Christmas and New Years ever and am feeling a lot more optimistic about the future. I've realised we were underselling our flat (£25k less than asking price- which makes a big difference when buying our onwards place as our deposit for our purchase is tied up in our flat) and that we're in a fantastic area and should enjoy it a bit more before moving on. I'm hoping this positive attitude continues and I don't have a meltdown next week but so far so good. Will stay on this thread to follow everyone's journeys.

Hello all. Hope you've all had a good Christmas and New Year.

Oh Yoga how bloody frustrating. As you say, you would think given that he works in estate agency he would have bloody known. Sigh. Any news on how long the delay is going to be?

Lazy oh for fucks sake. What is it with this stupid system? I hope you get it sorted soon.

Sorry to hear about the lack of viewings PixieDust. I would hope that viewings would pick up a bit now it's the new year and everything is getting back in the swing of things again.

We're still here too. Our purchase (so far) seems to be proceeding fairly smoothly. We've got our homebuyers report back which showed no major issues, and our official mortgage offer came through just after Christmas after a successful valuation survey. BUT, we've literally heard sweet FA from our buyers / buyers solicitors. Our solicitors haven't heard anything either and have told me they will chase them, but for good measure I've contacted our estate agents and asked them to chase them too. So far, I've heard nothing back from either our solicitors or our estate agents though (I wish I could say this was surprising, but I've gotten quite used to it). But I am getting quite anxious now. Our sale is complicated by the fact anyway that it's a shared ownership sale, which will probably inevitably slow things down anyway, but our buyers have now been selected since late November so even with the Christmas break they should have made some progress surely?!? But our buyers have been painfully bloody slow right back when they were going through the application process, and needed constant chasing by our estate agent, so I wouldn't be surprised if they've been sent lots of paperwork and have just sat on it all this time and done nothing. I've said to both our estate agent / solicitors that I would like to complete by Easter (because I have some holiday that I need to take by the end of March, and will be easier to move when I've got some annual leave to do it in). I'm hoping that a set date might focus their attention a bit.

x-post Catspants. Glad you are feeling positive about the future.

That's great Catspants lovely to hear that you have had a good Christmas and that you are so positive. Best of luck to you

Good news about the mortgage agreement and the survey KitKat! It's always nice to know that the house you are buying isn't going to need a new roof or rewiring (or something equally expensive!) as son as you move in

Hmmm.... could you speak to the HA? It's all well and good that they chose VSC but if that is impacting the chain they should have some way of enforcing progress - or at least have some sort of KPI for them. After all, if you had been able to chose you would have chosen the other couple as they seemed far more together and organised. I hope you get some progress soon. Fingers crossed for you.

Our EA rang and told us that they are offering "incentive" (along the lines of bottles of bubbly and gift vouchers) to the company who are tasked with providing the missing search if they can speed it through! If this will help we have no idea but it made me smile. Even without any acceptance of bribes they have said it will be through by Wednesday next week at the latest. Hopefully it will be earlier but I can live with that providing that's the end of it and the mortgage company don't then trigger another round of solicitors enquiries which would delay everything even further.

Sorry I haven't caught the updates fully. Really horrendous day stuck in limbo. I seem to be in a nightmare Alice in Wonderland scenario where common sense and logic are entirely absent. Have spent most of today either having panic attacks or crying. I am struggling to cope and seriously considering going to the Dr.