Solicitors messed up... what would you do?

[LittleRen]

We have been selling our house since July, it’s fallen through twice through no fault of ours - always been a short chain and always issues with our buyer. Our vendors have waited for us since July and we now have a cash buyer no chain and only one sale above us.

Everything was going well and almost ready to exchange with completion 29th March (we were looking to exchange today as our vendors want a gap of two weeks ideally). Our solicitors emailed at 3pm yesterday saying they just noticed our searches have expired - apparently they were only valid for 6 months (by our calcs they expired sometime in feb).

We can get an indemnity but apparently Natwest may not accept it so we need to pay for searches and they take time which means everything will get pushed back. We have had a lot of understandable pressure from our vendors and to potentially delay things by 2-3 weeks or more is going to really get their back up, despite how nice they are.

In my opinion our solicitors should have picked up on this weeks ago as we have simply been waiting for our buyers to catch up - we have been told numerous times everything at our end is ready to do.

My question is... how would you react to this, would you push for anything from the solicitors for this error eg a reduction in bill. Or would you just let it go? I guess I depends how our vendors and buyers react to the delay.

The best scenario is Natwest accept and indemnity as an exception but no idea when they will let us know.

House buying and selling is so stressful!

Your solicitor wouldn't have a problem selling the property with out of date searches and wouldn't ask you to pay for updated ones unless the buyer's solicitor and their lender insisted on it. The buyer's solicitor/lender has now insisted and want updated searches so now your solicitor has to provide them. You will of course be expected to pay.

They wouldn't reduce the bill for these, since search monies are paid to an outside company and this is their charge for providing the searches. The charge doesn't form part of the solicitor's fees. It is unfortunate that your sale has fallen through twice, but that is not your solicitors fault, nor your new buyers and their solicitor. Should the earlier sales have completed, you wouldn't need updated searches.

Incidentally, the buyer's solicitor may ask for updated office copies (title register) and you would be expected to pay for these as this is a charge levied by Land Registry, not your solicitor.

To be honest, I doubt Nat West will accept an indemnity policy.

As an example, the firm I work for is selling a property with an outdated EPC. The buyer's solicitor hasn't noticed and hasn't insisted that a new EPC be done. So, we don't ask our seller to do this, but when the buyer's solicitor does the final check, they may notice and will insist on a new one being provided, but it is up to the buying solicitor to spot errors and raise queries on them, not for the selling solicitor to point them out.

Sorry my post wasn’t clear - it’s our searches that have expired, on the property that we are buying. Why we are annoyed is because we have been told week after week everything is ready at our end then the day before exhange our solicitors checked our searches and realised they had expired.

@spickle
I think you have misunderstood, it’s Ren’s solicitor that has noticed that the searches for the property they are buying are now out of date, nothing to do with the sale.

Sorry double post - oops

Ah yes apologies - sounds like they only noticed when doing the final checks and are hoping the lender will accept an indemnity - doubt they will though or that you would be able to claim a reduction.