Buyers pressurising for exchange/completion but chain not read- what do we do?

[Binglebong29]

Hi everyone

We are in the process of buying and selling, it has been 3 months since our buyer made an offer and we made the offer on our new house.

We are ready to exchange on both sides, but our sellers related purchase isn't ready yet.

Our buyer is one end of the chain and our sellers related purchase is the other end.

Our buyer is putting increasing pressure on us to exhange/complete and we don't know what to do. Realistically we have to go through with our sale regardless, and we will have to go into rented, but of course this means our sellers would have to wait 6 months for our contract to run out or we call it a day and look again in a couple of months. And we really want to avoid going into rented.

I just don't know what to do, do we put pressure on the rest of the chain and make it clear everything is about to collapse? At the moment our solicitor has told theirs that we are "eagre" to complete and hasn't quite put across the seriousness of it. Or do we call our buyers bluff as much as we can? They originally wanted to complete next week and have now said the week after. As first time buyers they have little to loose.

The hold up is an enquiry surrounding a structural issue and our sellers are now having this looked into which I would imagine will take at least a week. The response from our sellers solicitor is they won't discuss a completion date until the enquiry has been resolved.

Even after they've had it looked into they could decide to pull out anyway!

Any advice?

If you cannot risk your purchase then maybe air bnb and storage short term. However chances are it is chinese whispers and your buyer thinks there is a real issue your end delaying things unnecessarily. If it seems it can be resolved quickly then let them know. Alternatively if the issue is with your vendors' purchase would they go into rented to enable you to move.

Yes that's true, our vendors could look into alternative acommodation rather than us but again it comes down to calling everyone's bluff and seeing who is the most scared of loosing their sale. I just hate this process!

We are keeping our buyers up to date and they know we are ready to exchange but it's our vendors who have a hold up with their own purchase. We've only just found out today what the hold up actually is so we will pass that on as well.

Then I guess it's just hoping they are willing to continue to wait!

We have tried to keep our buyers up to date and they are aware that we are ready to exchange

I had exactly the same problem when I moved. My Buyers and their buyers kept pushing but the top of the chain wasn't ready. Ironically, when the top of the chain was ready, the bottom developed an unexpected problem, hence another delay. This went on for three months - welcome to the world of buying and selling!

This always baffles me with buyers. As in unless your buyers find a vacant property, they will have to start this process all over again. And will probably end up waiting even longer.
Chains take a while to get together and this is normal.

I had this years ago, we ended up staying in a holiday let for three weeks and putting our stuff in storage, it probably cost us an extra £1k or so, but it meant we didn't lose our asking-price buyer. It was a pain but not so much as if the whole thing had fallen apart.