How can we assert some control over this house-buying situation?

[TheChineseChicken]

We're in the process of buying a house. We have had a buyer since October, had an offer accepted on a house just before Christmas, were due to complete end of February.

Our vendor is buying a new build and recently pulled out of the one they were due to buy and have instead reserved one with a completely different builder, now not due to be completed until June. We only found this out by accident so not sure when they were planning to tell us.

The vendor originally said they would break the chain and move in with family so the completion date wouldn't be affected. Now they are saying the house might be ready in May and let's just wait until we exchange to agree completion date. So obviously no intention of moving in with family.

I feel like we are being strung along. We don't want to wait until May/June to move for various reasons. And that means our buyer would have been waiting at least 7 months! How can we get the vendor to agree to an earlier moving date? Do they have us over a barrel?

Apache - we actually lost our 1st buyers because of exactly this.

They originally offered last April and we were in no rush to move as we knew it would be April/May this year before we had to complete on our purchase and the less time in rented the better. We gave them the option of moving over the summer holidays but they wanted to see their contract out on their rental property and so we all agreed to work towards an end of September completion.

Towards the end of July they suddenly wanted to complete by mid August - we couldn't agree to such short notice as by that time we still hadn't exchanged and had holidays booked and not even begun to look at removals etc. At first they didn't seem to have a problem with that but it turns out that when they went to extend their mortgage offer they were turned down and by that point it was just too late to get things moving. They were FTB albeit buying our fairly large 5 bed as their first home!

Luckily we resold again within a few weeks otherwise we would have missed out on the property we wanted which for us was the whole point of putting our property on the market in the first place

Yep I spoke from experience too. In our case we were selling during the slow-down of 2011ish after the whole sub-prime malarkey blew up. Our house was on the market for a year before we finally got a buyer. Then we found that there was virtually nothing on the market we wanted to put an offer in on - most people were sitting tight and not marketing their properties, what was available was limited to properties where the owner had no choice but to move, and nothing was quite right. We searched and searched but suddenly got an ultimatum from our buyers and had no choice but to either put in an offer on a not-very-nice but no-chain house that we could complete on quickly, or start all over again trying to find new buyers.

The grim market situation and the overcrowding we couldn't bear any longer in the old place forced us to get moving but in OP's scenario it sounds like the vendors may not care too much - maybe they know that another buyer will be along soon enough if they can't be bothered to meet the timetable needed by OP and OP's buyers?

You don't have to actually rent, you just need to let the vendor think that you will go into rented if they don't keep to the planned completion date.