No contract exchange date

[madcatladyforever]

I'm moving cross country to a new job after living here for 15 years or so.
My solicitor still will not give me any idea of an exchange of contract date after months.
I have constantly pestered her and my estate agents to agree a completion date, I'm moving into a rental on Thursday around 300 miles away and will have to leave my home empty.
I have sent numerous emails, been round to see my solicitor and feel I'm pissing into the wind. I have made it known that this is now urgent. I know the buyers are keen because they were round the other day to measure up for building work and furniture and keen to move in.
Nobody will give me any indication at all when we might exchange contracts and I'm getting incredibly pissed off. I have asked them to investigate the hold up as a matter of urgency, no reply and it's now the weekend and I'm massively stressed.
I can't afford a rental and the mortgage.
Is this normal or am I being ridiculous expecting some indication of a completion date? I'm tearing my hair out.

You need your EA and solicitor to tell you exactly what is outstanding / preventing immediate exchange, and your buyer needs to do the same with their solicitor.

Depending on the answer, it may put things into focus if you tell your EA to tell the buyer that unless you exchange by xx date you will need to re-market.

EAs are often very guys at sorting these things out: solicitors get paid whatever the outcome, EAs depend on a successful sale.

Thank you Nicola, I rung up my EA and said the house is coming off the market unless I get an exchange date on Monday. That got them jumping about no end.

EAs are often very guys at sorting these things out: solicitors get paid whatever the outcome, EAs depend on a successful sale

Not true in most cases. Solicitors generally work on a no-completion, no fee basis and their fees (paid on completion) are usually significantly less than an EA charges for their sale fee, for a lot less work.

I work as a conveyancing paralegal and if your solicitor will not discuss exchange dates with you, it means you're not near enough through the process to accurately predict when that might be. As mentioned above, you really need to find out what your solicitor is waiting for and what the next steps are and buyer should also be contacting their solicitor to find out the same. An EA can liaise up and down the chain and try to keep it together, but essentially the work is out of their hands now it has passed over to the legal side and they will not be a party to the general legal work being carried out.

Oops, solicitors do a lot more work.

Even so Spickle there's no excuse for solicitors not communicating with their client where things are up to. It's complained about a lot.

Wowfudge, I agree it's complained about a lot, however many solicitors are responsible for so many cases nowadays to be competitive on fees (150-200 live files at any one time), that very little time is allocated for updating clients, particularly where there is no update. The low fees generally charged mean that solicitors are having to deal with volume over quality and their time is at a premium to get the actual work done rather than talking about it over and over again to clients who think they are helping by phoning every day, sometimes more than once. It's why a lot of solicitors have an online tracker system, which is supposed to help manage client expectations, but in practice, if the tracker isn't updated every couple of days, clients bombard them with telephone calls. I do always try to update clients when they call, but it has to be said that the expectation of clients is way too much and it has a seriously detrimental effect on the amount of actual conveyancing work achieved during the working day. The answer would be to employ more staff, but that would mean fees would have to rise and the majority of clients' want to pay as little as possible while demanding premium service.