For those “under offer”, how soon did you find next home?

[Sweett00th]

We’ve done More viewings on couple places and tbh nothing is making me want to put offer in. If anything it’s making me appreciate my flat more! Only that we really want to buy a house as need extra room.

How long did it take you to find an onward purchase after going under offer?

I feel exactly the same, I cant find anything better than my house. Looking for a detached from a 3 storey townhouse and not finding anything. Been looking for 3 months now x

5 weeks, but it felt like months as I was worried nothing would come up!

It took us two weeks which seemed like forever. Our vendor is now two weeks in, not found anything and our buyers are getting antsy.

3 weeks, and our buyer was getting VERY jittery. Any longer and we would have lost them - those 3 weeks were bloody stressful.

My buyers want to move in by Christmas but tbh can’t see that happening! Really hope next week we have better luck. It’s a pain also as any potential seller can’t look at places until they are under offer. Finding a no chain property is like needle in haystack, at a premium!

It took us 3 weeks and as not a lot was coming on the market I was getting very anxious. We found somewhere that was empty so no onward chain so that was a great positive. We are pushing the chain as quickly as possible as we want to be in before school application date in January and preferably before Christmas.

Good luck @Sweett00th all it takes is one house to appear at the right time. We were considering putting leaflets through doors, felt a bit extreme but I've heard it work for people. Might be worth a try? We struck lucky and found out about a house available but not yet on the market, and they're buying an empty house jackpot! I hope you have better luck next week

Thanks @Anawi, hopefully some of that luck will come our way and we find something! 🙂

We found one the next week. I was very anxious about making our buyers wait so we looked at all of the ones on the market (6 or 7) and chose the best. It's not perfect and there were a few compromises but I didn't want to risk it selling and nothing else coming on as we have a schools application deadline and a tight budget.

Our next move will be to our forever home and I am going to plan more carefully and factor in renting if need be to find the perfect house

Yes it's difficult isn't it? The ideal situation is to have buyers who aren't too fussed about timing. We were disappointed with viewings in the area we wanted to be, noticed particularly very tired, unextended kitchens. And yet crazy prices and selling very quickly. I think it must be Londoners who've decided to work at home and can afford to fix up from their sales money. So no further forward and decided to focus on another area.

We have been under offer for a month now but not found anywhere else.
We are viewing everything in our budget now, even ones we discounted for whatever reason. Fortunately our buyer is not in a rush and is chain free but I assume there will come a time where we need to decide whether we will sell and rent whilst we look.

This is why it’s laughable that not looking until you’ve sold’.

We’d already found .. luckily in our area they are allowing viewings when your house is on the market but not sold! I’ve had to show the Rightmove advert to every estate agent but once they are happy we are genuinely selling, we’ve been able to view loadsa houses 🤷🏼‍♀️ I’m in a Corona hotspot area as well!

We’d seen the house we wanted, expressed our interest & then waited to sell. Which thankfully we did quite quickly. The vendors of the house we bought found within 10 days..

Hi @Sweett00th, I posted a similar thread last week - how long is too long to wait for your vendors. We’ve been waiting 3weeks now and they’ve not returned any docs to solicitor so this weekend we started to see what else was on the market. We have FTBs and don’t want to lose them.

The stamp duty deadline is certainly putting additional pressures on access wait times!

Six terrifying weeks. We were literally hitting refresh on Rightmove every hour to try and find something we might like.

On the plus side we ended up viewing something we'd never have previously considered with our super specific criteria... and fell in love!

I remember reading that it takes 100+ hours on average, researching and viewing. That certainly is a lot of time and could easily take months depending on how 'intensely' you're looking!

100 hours?! I literally saw both our houses on Rightmove, loved them, viewed, viewed again & offered. I do know the areas extremely well though. So didn’t need to do any research really other than the immediate neighbourhood & double checking school catchments!

I would definitely recommend putting notes through peoples doors in an area you like. I’ve just sold my house and found the perfect house, when I rang to view it the estate agent said they were under offer and wouldn’t let me see it so I went and put a note through the door saying if anything went wrong with the sale please contact me. I got a call a few days later to say the guy that had put an offer in hadn’t got his mortgage sorted and they wanted to move quickly, I went and viewed it the day after, put an offer in and was accepted and now all going ahead.

My friend recently went on location location location and said the way the programme works is the researchers go around the area that you are interested in and put leaflets through all the doors and some people that might be thinking they want to sell but haven’t yet gone on the market get in touch and you get to see houses before they list it, so I’d definitely put flyers through.

We've been waiting 4 weeks to find something. Missed out on two houses we loved as were outbid on one, and the other accepted an offer from a cash buyer the day before the offer was confirmed from our buyer, nothing has come on in our specific area for two weeks now. Market seems to be slowing and our search area is tiny to stay near to our DD primary school so it's really difficult.

We may have to lose our buyers and wait until spring if nothing else comes up in the next two weeks, as don't think our buyers will wait forever. We've decided we're not going into rented with two young kids at the minute. We've done over 100 flyers, but had no replies.

We found something the following week, pushed into it by panic and wanting to get something sorted as it was a 3 hour drive away and we couldn't keep going there very often. Anyway, that taught us a good lesson as it was a mistake and the location was all wrong though the house was lovely. We moved again 10 months later.

OP, have you considered 3-bed flats? The house you linked on the other thread didn’t have any more sq footage than a good flat would have. You also wouldn’t have any layout problems in a purpose built flat.

I’m in a flat currently, never again!