Hello, newbie here! I am in the middle of a house purchase and have been relying on various threads on here over the past few months to provide a sense/ sanity check - but can't find one for my current predicament so thought I'd take the leap of posting myself!
In mid Feb my BF and I had an offer accepted on a flat. We are first time buyers, currently renting, and got lucky in that we found a lovely flat in a relatively short space of time. Our offer was a good bit above the asking price (and at the top of our budget) as there were several interested parties, but luckily we got it.
At the time, the seller told us they were looking to buy a new property but as it was in a different area, they had the option of staying with family etc. if needed. Our timings were that our rental lease was due to expire at the end of May, which gave us around 15 weeks to get through all the processes. We said we could be flexible to an extent (a few weeks either side) but that was the deadline we were working to and no one raised any concerns. We got our mortgage signed off, survey done, quote for building work etc. all done within a month (there is some basic repair work to do which will probably cost a few thousand pounds- after some thinking we decided not to reduce our offer because we thought it wasn't worth any delay and the work is not very significant).
However, our seller is moving soooo slowly. About two months in, he was still filling out his fixtures and fittings, and our solicitors had heard absolutely nothing. It took until the end of April for them to respond to our solicitors emails and send over details like fixtures and fittings etc. Since then, we have gone back with some questions about the lease, claims on property etc. and while they have come back on some, a month later they still aren't all answered. Meanwhile, the seller has told us he has had an offer accepted on a new property but hasn't discussed any dates with them, and asked us if we can just go on a rolling contract. Our solicitor's view is that his side is deliberately slowing down the process to help align the two sales, and his view is that there's nothing we can do to speed this up - it's entirely in their hands.
I know we were optimistic to think we could get it done by the end of May, but it's four months after we had our offer accepted and we are still waiting on basic information about the property, and no one will give us any indication of a likely completion date. We are not able to go onto a rolling contract as our landlord won't have it, but we have extended our lease by a month, and now it looks like we will have to do this again until the end of July. This is an addition £2.5k cost to us.
We have always gotten on well with the seller and I have some sympathy for them because I get the impression their move is due to some difficult family circumstances, and it is a lot to work out. However, we have always taken a softly-softly approach and I feel like it has backfired because we're making no progress and ultimately it's us paying the cost for the delay for what should be a relatively simple sale. Friends are telling us to threaten to pull out and my view was always that this was an empty threat because he will know we're faking - but increasingly I am starting to doubt whether he intends to sell any time soon. In the meantime the market has slowed a bit so if we cut our losses we could probably get somewhere for cheaper (but not somewhere as nice, I don't think).
I think I just had to get that out of my system, but does anyone have any advice about how we can speed this up? Or whether we're being unreasonably naive to think that we should be able to?
All thoughts welcome!