Feel like I’m going mad! Exchange and completion!

[Thatswhathappens]

After a very long winded and drawn out process, we finally had a completion date of next Friday, with an exchange tue/wed next week. Just spoke to our useless solicitors that have decided to tell us today the buyers solicitors haven’t even sent the contract out yet to our buyers! There is no way we will complete next Friday now is there? This has been the most stressful period of my life ever and our solicitors are just useless!

Buyers do tend to sign much much much later than sellers. I’d not panic too much. If they get it out tomorrow they should have it back in time.

There’s a good chance it will be fine. The contract signing stage is fairly straight forward as long as your buyers don’t mess around returning it to their solicitor.

They only need to sign it, takes no time at all.

Don’t worry! You can still do it. Our buyers signed contract wasn’t received until the morning we exchanged.

Thankyou all, I feel so frustrated with my solicitors, every time I call them they assure me they have all the paperwork and everything is fine! This process is soo nerve wracking!

When we moved last year we emailed our solicitor (DH and I separately from our own accounts) telling him we have permission for him to sign on our behalf on the day of exchange. Don't sweat it.

@Thatswhathappens huge empathy from me. We've been ready to exchange for 3 weeks now in a chain of 3. Agreed a completion date of this Friday (and were due to exchange last Thursday). We were abundantly clear that our removals company would not commit to reserving our booking until we'd exchanged. We tried to exchange twice last week and it then transpired that our buyers hadn't returned some essential forms so actually weren't able to exchange. We then lost our provisional removals slot and having called 6 other firms none could get us moved for this Friday. Since then we've been waiting for buyer's solicitor to return calls, missed another 2 opportunities to exchange and our completion date has gone from the 4th to the 7th. We've got rather tired of repeating to our (somewhat impatient buyers) that until we exchange we are stuck as we cannot guarantee removals so need to prioritise that. Touch wood we're now due to exchange tomorrow but DH and I are really aware that we could exchange and then still find our removals company have become fully booked and then we'll be back to square one 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️

I would add to give you some hope though that you may well still have time- when we bought here we actually exchanged and completed on the same day. Wouldn't recommended it but if you're sorted for removals etc then it could still work!

The buyers may well be as stressed as you and hopefully they’ll return it the same day. Ours was emailed to us, we printed, got the neighbours to witness and it was posted back in the solicitors letterbox that day as they were local-ish. We wanted it done and dusted, as ours dragged on and on.

Goodness I've already signed my sales contract and we are nowhere near exchanging! Mind you at this stage I'm not sure she's still going to sell at all...

Yes that is enough time to get it signed and returned in time for exchange. Your solicitor has no control of when your buyers solicitor send the contract out to their client.