Buying a house but currently in rented house - when to give notice?

[StuntNun]

I had an offer accepted on a house three weeks ago. There's no chain as the current owners of the house are moving in with their parents and we are currently renting. We have to give two months notice to leave our rented house and DH thinks we should wait until contracts have been exchanged before we give notice. I'm worried that is going to add an unacceptably long time on to the process of buying a house. We can't afford to pay both rent and mortgage for a month or more if there's a long overlap.

It isn't a rolling contract, it's a supplemental agreement for 12 months. The agreement specifies two months notice for both landlord and tenant.

Get the house exchanged

Then ask the LL if they would consider a shorter notice as they are wanting to sell. My guess is that they just might go for it.

Otherwise you will have to set the completion date of 6 weeks ish later
will give you the time you need to move and clean the rental to handback on the 2 months

Could you speak to your landlord and agree for them to have the last months rent from your deposit? That way you dont have to pay out for rent and mortgage in that overlap month.

I ignored the wisdom on here and gave notice to landlord before exchange... and then a day before we were due to exchange, the vendor who was “moving into rented” announced that he was actually now getting a mortgage. Such an asshole!

Thankfully we were able to extend our rental, but at additional expense that we hadn’t expected.

Definitely wait till exchange!

ah right - fixed term with break. two months it is.

specify a long gap between exchange and complete, and dont.complete on a Friday. As I said, do not believe no chain. only guaranteed on probate sales or vacant ex rentals.

Thanks for the advice everyone. I have written to the property manager and asked whether the landlord would consider reducing our notice period to one month or six weeks. Even cutting it from two months to six weeks would save us over a thousand pounds so it's definitely worth asking.