Advice re purchase - we are stuck

[checkedcloth]

We had an offer accepted on a house in September. The sale of our house is going well, all we have to share is a boiler service cert and then we are ready for exchange.

Our purchase however is a different story. We still do not have a response to our enquiries raised in early November having already waited 12 weeks for the chain to complete above us.

The EA that we are buying from just says ‘I’m chasing’. We literally never get a straight answer or update.

I’m almost at the point of contact our vendors myself to see if we can work together to unlock this as I have no confidence that the EA is doing anything.

Would welcome others views and and advice

Is your solicitor not giving you updates?

We found the EA didn't pull their finger out until we kicked up an almighty fuss. Let me email outlining how long we had been waiting and saying we were considering pulling out because the lack of information suggested that something was being hidden from us. It was annoying that it got to that but it made a difference.

Contacting the seller direct is risky. We did it but we were careful to make the emails light touch and about progress rather than details. It really helped for a little then they decided it was stressful for them so asked to go back to communication through EA. So we respected that.

We offered on our place in August btw...still not exchanged.

Its the solicitors who should be doing things not the EA. What have they said?

Is an option to sell and to rent for a while?

Are you willing to pull out of the purchase?

If the seller doesn’t have a solicitor, that’s not a good sign!

When you say “waiting for the chain to complete”, do you mean someone is still looking for somewhere to buy?

If that’s the case, constant updates aren’t really going to make any difference are they? The only update you want is “they’ve had an offer accepted”.

Renting short term is an option, as @Dozer suggests.

You could threaten to pull out if nothing’s happening after a certain cut off date. That might encourage the people who are holding things up to get on with it, or even move into short-term rental themselves.

You could start looking for alternative properties without declaring your intentions at this stage, in case this chain never completes.

All EA's do is piss people off, they have nothing to do with the actual sale/purchase. Go through the conveyancers and give a rough deadline but without being militant about it.

I'd definitely be considering contacting the vendor

It should be your solicitor doing the chasing/updates rather than the EA, at least that was the case with our recent purchase. We did have a little chuckle though when 4 days after exchange the EA got in touch to say he had an update and believed we’d now exchanged

Are your sellers still looking for somewhere to buy?

Thanks for all the replies.

Sorry - I think I may have not been clear. The chain is complete now, and has been since pre Xmas. We had been told it was completed and then after seven weeks we were advised there was one final purchase at the end of the change.

Our solicitor has been excellent and very responsive, however our vendors solicitors just do not respond to any amount of chasing.

The EAs just say they are ‘chasing’ too.

The frustration is that every week we just hear that everyone is ‘chasing’ but there never appears to be any tangible outcome to this.

Would we go into rented? Ideally not - I’m a front line nurse in the NHS and really cannnot face an additional move, I’m hardly at home at the moment as really don’t have the energy to add that in.

@checkedcloth I just came on here to write a similar post! Our chain is ready to complete but now our buyers buyer (top of the chain) has gone quiet. He's not returning emails and he's WFH so nobody can get in touch with him directly via phone. EA's are also trying to chase too and have tried contacting the buyers buyer themselves but they work frontline NHS so are obviously busy themselves. Don't know what to do from here. Hopefully they're just busy but how long do you allow?!

We contacted our vendor when communication stopped between our solicitors in the middle of the last lockdown. DH dropped round under the pretence of giving them reassurance that nothing had changed on our end and we were still keen as mustard to proceed despite the pandemic.

Thankfully they were lovely, and most pissed off that their solicitor wasn’t answering queries etc.

From there we exchanged numbers and just text each other when necessary instead of dragging out communications with solicitors. Worked out really well and we’ve kept in touch!