Hello, we're hoping to finally exchange on our BTL house purchase this week after the sellers ('the Smiths') pushed back the completion date for the second time - bearing in mind that our solicitor indicated we were ready to exchange back in mid-January. The Smiths are buying a house from the Joneses, and the Joneses' agent/legal team have been extremely slow dealing with straightforward issues, hence the delay, and it's taken a lot of emails and calls from me over the last month to get us to the stage we're at today.
However, because everything looked like it was sorted back in January, and we were oblivious to these issues, we withdrew our six figure deposit from a high interest savings account ready to exchange and have therefore lost out on earning a sizeable amount of interest- probably around £500. The two months delay means we've also lost out on 2 months of rent - say £2,000.
Would we be unreasonable to ask the sellers to compensate us for some of our most earnings, say £2,000? Although the rental income isn't the Smiths' responsibility, they accepted our offer on the basis of us being BTL landlords and thus having the advantage of no mortgage issues, no need to give notice, no chain etc. We realise that some of the delays were further up the chain but feel that they could have put pressure on the parties they were buying from, earlier in the process. I certainly shouldn't have had to put pressure on to get the top end of the chain moving. The Smiths could therefore ask for the Joneses to reimburse them for some of the compensation they pay us.
We're not aware of any other arrangements of this nature, though, so wondered if anyone else had any experience of other parties in a chain compensating the bottom of the chain for loss of income resulting from avoidable delays?