Vendors leaving property in a mess

[Ria131518]

I'm looking for some advice. We completed our sale yesterday picked up keys from the EA and the found the previous owner left their rubbish outside/garden and left the house in a state. This will mean us having to get a skip to clear it out. Do we have rights to get them to pay or suck it up and sort it out ourselves? Thanks!

Yes, they are in breach of contract. But you'd have to sue them. I would have a chat with your solicitor. Did you take photos? We had this happen to us and decided it was better to sort it and move on rather than spending time, money and effort pursuing the vendor. He was broke anyway and needed to sell the house so we'd have been on a hiding to nothing.

We had this happen too. Went to solicitors who advised vendors to remove rubbish or they would be billed. They did nothing and we spent £150 getting the rubbish disposed of. The bill was sent to vendors but they didn't pay. Eventually we decided to just write it off but it was annoying.

I wouldn't think it's worth pursuing now, not without a lot of hassle and and very likely more solicitors' fees.

I know it's no help now, but I did once suspect that a vendor was going to leave a load of old crap for me to get rid of - I knew he was returning to his country or origin. So I made it clear that I expected him to clear it all, and arranged to meet the EA at the property shortly before completion, to check. Sure enough, there was a load of rubbish, manky old sofas, etc.

I refused to complete until he'd cleared it all, so completion was delayed 24 hours. He was pissed off, but it was his own fault after I'd been explicit about clearing it.

Solicitors letter then if they don't pay, small claims court.

Thanks all. I think we wil clear it to avoid the extra hassle. I know they will not be compliant. I want to steer clear of solicitors for a while!

Just been in this situation.

You can aks them to pay it but doesn't mean they will.

Our solicitor said if we wanted to take further then go to small claims court which application is £100 alone and could take a while so we didn't pursue it as skip cost £200.

In the end it did take 2 skip fulls and we havent even cleared the garden yet.

They. Left coats. Hats. Plates. Cleaning stuff even though they never cleaned a day in their lives. Half drunk wine bottles behind curtains. Dog shit. Dog piss. And much much more

Yes I’ve bought a flat that was empty but disgusting. The agent made a big deal the the sellers had left a box of cleaning stuff - had to throw that out the bottles had as much on the outside of the bottles as inside. No light in the living room either.
I always pay for a proper clean when I leave a place.

We got half the price of the skip back through the solicitors talking to each other. Still annoys me tbh as they admitted they’d left all this junk. They refused to pay the full cost of the skip (plus it took us a day to clear out). Our solicitor said that it wasn’t worth pursuing the other half of the skip cost as it would cost more than the value

IME you are best just to deal with it yourself
The sort of people who would leave a house like this are very unlikely to respond to a request to pay so you would have to sue then enforce the judgment
Might be worth one letter from your solicitor,unless they are going to charge you a lot