Timescale from offer to Mortgage Valuation?

[YellowNotRed]

First time buyers are purchasing our buyer's house. Their offer was accepted 6 weeks ago, then the next week their vendor (our buyer) put an offer on ours. So all starting at the same time really.

I'm really concerned because I have been told by the estate agent that the first-time buyers haven't sent off for searches yet and they have their mortgage valuation booked for tomorrow.

Is it normal for it to take 6+ weeks for a mortgage valuation or have they delayed booking one? How long is the usual time from valuation (all being well) to mortgage offer?

Concerned this is going to take months when we were promised weeks; our solicitor is ready to exchange on our purchase so we're just waiting on the first-time buyers!

Honestly at this time it is incredibly hard to tell when everything is going to happen, it will all depend on how long the different companies involved are taking to process things.

For us we accepted an offer from a FTB Early July, chain was complete within 2 weeks and now we have just been waiting for mortgage companies etc. For us it took 3 weeks until we were even able to get an appointment with our mortgage company to go through the details, the survey took another 3 weeks to be carried out, and then we got our mortgage offer through the day after the survey but this might take a bit longer if the bank want's to see the whole survey (took 7 days for our whole survey to be typed out). Our buyers were a bit slower as they had previously been on Furlough and so needed a full paycheck before they could get their appointments (which luckily went okay!)

As such I wouldn't assume that they are delaying things on purpose, it might literally be that they haven't been able to get appointments for these things that would admittedly normally only take a couple of days :)

The searches could be an issue as the council dealing with them might have a backlog and so they might take a couple of weeks to come back. We ordered ours late August and they haven't come back... so you might want to ask your solicitor to chase theirs about this!

Another quick note, no matter what you are better off sticking with them as if you drop them and try to find someone else then you might end up waiting another 2-3 months to complete when all your current buyers need to do now is get their searches... As long as they are still communicative and getting things done then I wouldn't hold any of this against them!

Thanks very much @Preseli for your replies; I feel more reassured now, the estate agents did mention the mortgage company are being very slow but I didn't know if he was fobbing my questions off.

Hopefully I will hear back tomorrow that they've initiated searches at least. I'd forgotten how stressful/frustrating this process can be!

Not to cause concern but ours took 14 weeks

And we are still waiting for search results

So stressful but hang in there! Everything is raking longer because of furlough and mortgage companies are being extra cautious.

I can absolutely cope with unavoidable delays, it is what it is!

My main concern was that they were delaying for an unknown reason...but it sounds like there are big delays and this is just part of the current climate. Pah!

18 months ago we waited an age for NatWest to get their act together and value the house. In fact their slowness resulted in considerable compensation from NatWest!

@Flamingolingo

18 months ago we waited an age for NatWest to get their act together and value the house. In fact their slowness resulted in considerable compensation from NatWest!

Oh blimey! How long did they take?! Hope the compensation was decent for you!

Well we offered in April and due to a catalogue of errors on their part they didn’t validate the mortgage offer until August. I think we got about £1500 in the end.

Our buyers’ solicitors advised them to not risk their money on a home buyers until we had confirmed we were proceeding on the house we are buying.

We offered, agreed, instructed solicitors and booked surveys within a week. They then decided it was time to instruct their surveyor... only to be told the first available date was October 20. I’m gnashing my teeth!

Everything seems way slower than when we last did this seven years ago, but the market has gone mental here with stamp duty holiday and mortgage brokers, searches etc are all taking a while. It seems par for the course.

It might not be them delaying. Our mortgage offer took ages and then I found that the solicitors hadn’t sent off for searches - at no point did the solicitors ask us, I’d have said yes to searches going off straight away with the risk of losing a few hundred pounds if I’d known, I thought it was all going on in parallel. And I’ve bought a few times before.

This happened to us, it took our buyer 7 weeks to get the mortgage offer, we were told he had actioned his solicitor but he hadn't, it would have been quite a quick sale otherwise, the conveyancing thankfully all happened very quickly once started.

We put an offer on a house at the beginning of August and it has taken until today to get our mortgage company to value the house. It's taken them so long to complete everything. Everything is taking much longer than normal due to covid. We have been told a minimum of 6 weeks for searches to come back as well.