Sellers/Buyers Roll Call 8 and still going

[Fern204]

Hope it's ok to start a new thread.
Bottom of our chain should exchange on Monday and then the top will hopefully exchange a week later. I dont quite understand, something to do with a charge on our buyers house which needs to be released first.
Aiming to complete on 15th July, so hopefully not much longer.
I will never move again, and definitely not in a chain of 10!

Ok so mortgage offer back, we received the contracts this morning + our seller wants to complete on 20/7.

My arsehole has now fallen out 😀

Got to sign the contracts + start packing i guess. Problem is we got this far before, infact closer + it fell through so im trying to keep the faith whilst waiting for it to go to shit 😖

ugh my boxes still haven't turned up, apparently they went missing somewhere between to depot and the delivery van :S

A new set should come tomorrow.

I’ve got the paperwork signed by the school to send to the next county we move to, but don’t want to do it until we have exchanged.

We got our contracts today on the house we are buying. Which is exciting, not sure what I was expecting but lots of certificates to read and decipher. After two weeks of radio silence it feels like a step forward.

We had our buyers surveyor visit us today, didn’t mention anything so hopefully positive.

Is it reasonable to ask for the boiler to be serviced and the oil tank more recently than 2017? We are planning to service our and our boiler is only 4 years and still in warranty.

Our seller won't budge on price, so we will need to find the cash for the windows.
And our buyer wants to buy some of our furniture - which is nice... but I've ebayed or skipped everything we don't want - wish theyd said sooner...

Oh @karcheer I see yes if you can take the £20k out of the deposit and have a slightly increased LTV then it makes sense. Shame it’s no dice with your vendor then, but if you don’t ask you don’t get hey.

My sale has fallen through.
Buyers been turned down for their mortgage as ‘only’ got 10% deposit (still £65k!), and apparently only two lenders in the UK are offering mortgages to those with 10%. The lender also won’t offer mortgages on the type of build my house is, so it has to go back on the market.
The vendors of the house we’ve offered on will give us two weeks to find another buyer, but will put it back on market if we don’t find anyone in that time.

To top it all off, my mortgage company (the lender I’m with already) is now asking for proof of income (they’d said previously that they wouldn’t need to do this, as I’ve been with them 6 years, and we’re just porting the mortgage across. We aren’t increasing the mortgage at all, plus we’ve got £360k deposit), yet because we took the mortgage holiday at start of lockdown, they now need all kinds of evidence of income.
Kicking myself that we did the mortgage holiday - we didn’t even really need it, just thought it would be good to have that extra chunk of money in savings (getting married soon, so was putting it towards the wedding),

I am gutted for you too tigerbear as this circumstance does make it harder. We are in 2 minds of going back to our lender for lower rate( we are in LTV 65% so the rates are lower now compared to what we were offered beg of Feb). It makes the difference in long run as its a very large mortgage and we plan to go for 5 yrs fixed however I am worried that the terms/policy has now changed and could preventing us from getting the maximum loan we need as lenders dont consider bonuses anymore after Covid plus the fact that it would prolong on an already lengthy process.

So we lost the top of our chain today. Luckily they were going into rented, and their buyers have agreed to rent now, so the chain of 9 remains intact.
Our buyers buyer is having issues with her buyer, and until these are resolved, we cant exchange. I am tearing my hair out. I have said we will review our position on Friday. I would be gutted to lose it all at this stage, but it feels never ending.

Just heard from the financial advisor. Theres a 2 day delay on sign off due to the volume of business they are processing, so if everything is ok the final offer should be issued on Friday (hopefully)...

I do wonder if we are better holding off exchanging on our home until the mortgage is signed off... i really could do with not being homeless and unable to get a mortgage :/

@Karcheer your solicitor wont allow you to exchange without a mortgage offer

@fern204 we are exchanging on our house about a week before we exchange on the one we are buying.

Mils bungalow went up for sale yesterday ( she has gone into a nursing home). Sold for cash today. Hopefully the survey comes back ok as they want to move in by the end of July at the latest. They are staying with family for now.

I ended up viewing 4 houses today. Phoned to arrange viewings thinking it would be in a few days time but they organised them all for today. Loved 2 of them. One needs quite a bit of work but large sized rooms and perfect location. Other doesn't need anything done to it and is nice and modern but bedroom 3 is tiny. But haven't sold my house yet so both will probably go before I can proceed.

Just got update from mortgage broker that it’s gone to the underwriters, and that we should get an answer tomorrow, guess that’s a good thing?!

Still waiting for survey report, should be tomorrow now (they did it on Friday and they said by 4 working days after).

Sorry to hear about all these sales falling through. It sounds like loads of deals are failing, is this a normal amount?

@Lemonylemony yes that’s a good thing, this is the bit that’s delayed for us because of their backlog. Sounds like things are happening at the same time for us.

I think this is the “new normal” I’ve bought and sold before and it wasn’t, but we’ve been selling this house during brexit and Covid and chain seem to fall at various hurdles nowadays 😞

I’ve just made a builders day... I had a load of excess roof tiles on eBay, no one has shown any interest and I was thinking that I’d have to put them in the skip, which would’ve been sad as it was really hard for my builder to get the right ones when we had our extension done, so are probably priceless to someone...anyway I’ve sold them to him for £10... there are about 50... just looked and to buy them new they are about £6 each... I don’t have the time to faff about... I’m just happy they are going to be used!

@Newhome321 thanks. I’m devastated on both accounts, of my buyer falling through, and more angry with myself that we did the mortgage holiday when we didn’t even have to. It was more of a ‘why not, be nice to have the cash in the bank’ than a necessity.
My estate agent has got a new viewing set up already for Saturday, so fingers crossed.
@Lemonylemony I think more deals are falling through due to lenders being extra cautious now :-(

@Melrose86 We also for the first time viewed houses today. We viewed 3 houses. We liked the first one the most. Needs lots of work. At the very least we will need to strip the cigarette smell soaked carpets and wall paper. However, like you we haven't sold our house yet. We only signed the contract with EA on Monday and photos are to be taken tomorrow. We will ask for a 2nd viewing though. The EA let slip that the vendors were difficult as the EA was one of the several EAs in the last 18 months that has tried to sell this place. He mentioned that they might be divorcing. I don't know why he said these things; I think he was trying to tell us that the viewing that was cancelled last week at due to self isolating was a fib. I now know not to market my house with Purple Bricks.

I'm sorry about those whose sales are falling through. We are right at the beginning of this process that I'm getting spooked by the whole process.

Jumping into this thread if that’s ok! We are also just starting the craziness, put our house on the market a couple of weeks ago and sold it in 3 days, most unexpectedly. Then had a scramble to view as many houses as we could ASAP and luckily happened to fall in love with one, vendor unofficially accepted our offer but then took ages to formally accept (needed to confirm with his wife and I think she was hard to contact or something maybe?!).
Have been chasing my mortgage broker relentlessly, he’s normally fab but very hard to get hold of at the moment! Phone appt tomorrow to get mortgage ball properly rolling, holding out to see if they have any good deals on solicitors at the moment but if not will instruct the people who moved us into our current house.
So so hoping this all goes through ok & quickly - this is intended to be our forever house/last move for a very long time and I so want it to work out. Our buyers are first time buyers and the house we’re buying is currently empty, so a v short chain which should hopefully make things easier! Not looking forward to the next few months of paperwork and phone calls though 😫

Welcome new house hunters/buyers/sellers! It’s really useful being on this thread, as a FTB it’s great having a mini army of other women going through the process for advice and support. Cheers all!

So our survey report is back and nothing too shocking in there for a 90 year old building, general maintenance and wear and tear, there is advice that boiler is old and check service history etc so I feel vindicated asking about that, I just want it to last a few years until we remodel the kitchen and then replace it at that point.

Only red flag was electrics - we saw a new/modern consumer unit on our viewing so thought that was fine but there is a second older one as well we didn’t see and both seem to be in use, surveyor has recommended a partial re-wire and included the vaguely concerning phrase “old electrical wiring may cause fire” so I think we’re going to ask for an Electrical Installation Condition Report, that’s my job for the day to get that arranged. Do I go through the solicitor or estate agent to set that up with the vendor?

@Lemonylemony I went directly to the estate agent to set up the poo cam survey (which is happening as we speak)

Big question of the day is... will my boxes arrive%!?!?

Am I supposed to be doing anything? Gave all my documents to my lawyer (sale of my tenanted flat) on Monday and haven't heard a word. I hope that means that they have all the documents. How long usually til they book in the mortgage survey.

It all happened so fast and now so quiet. I know it's ridiculous but it's making me nervous

@Bells3032 I was just thinking the same.

Application went in on Friday last week, this Friday they're calling me to ensure im happy with the insurance figures, and the surveyor was due out this week /sometime next week.

But what am I meant to be doing? Just sitting around like a lemon?

So just found out a desktop valuation was done on our house this week and the application is with the underwriters, fingers crossed he will have a mortgage offer next week. I think I will relax when that's in as that seems to be the biggest stumbling block right now. I don't think he's doing any other kind of survey, the house is only 10 years old.

Absolutely no idea how the conveyancing is going, a bit nervous to ask tbh.....supposed to be exchanging next week (which won't happen, he only instructed them a week or so ago )

@Karcheer hope the boxes arrive! Thanks, I asked the solicitor as well (not that they’ve replied to my last email from 3 days ago yet anyway) but once I’ve decided which electrician to go with I’ll bug the estate agent. Or maybe I should do that now so they are forewarned to expect the call.

I’m making it my business to know when I expect to hear next from who about what, so always asking the solicitor/mortgage broker for expected timescale on each step etc. The solicitor is not great at responding to be honest, but I know what I’m waiting to hear back from her about at least.