Waiting fr the chain

[windywoowah]

We are out of practice with house moving having not moved for over 20 years. Can I just ask, when do we instruct our solicitor? Before the chain is complete or should we wait until the chain is complete? We have an offer on ours with no chain behind them and have had our offer accepted on the property we want to purchase. They are now looking for a property.
We are worried about our solicitor doing work on our potential purchase and then our vendor pulling out for some reason.

I think it's quite common to instruct immediately /pretty soon to be honest. We got quotes and provisionally found a solicitor before going to market and then instructed them on the sale side within 48 hours of accepting an offer (helped show our buyers we were serious about the sale and our agent needed solicitor details from both sides before they'd mark the property as Sold STC). We then instructed the same solicitors for purchase when we found our next home 4 weeks later.

Instruct them, but hold off on searches and survey. I was told my seller would go in to rental so went ahead, he then said he had to buy - almost three months later and he's still looking so I'm now looking again too, and hope to find one chain free.

I've already got solicitors on retainer ready and going on market next week. But generally don't do any actual legal work until the chain is complete.

Get them instructed so they can get the file open and do their KYC checks. Then they will be ready to start work once the chain is complete.

Thanks all

If the property you are buying is in any way potentially tricky (old building, extension, etc) I think I would think twice about about not getting the survey done now. You could be waiting months before your chain is complete, only to discover it’s a complete dog and you don’t want to buy it after all.

We nearly lost the house we're buying as sellers wanted a quick sale and other buyers were in a slightly better position than us (we'd both sold current properities to FTB but theirs had mortgage offer, ours only had agreement in principal) so got swept up in the urgency and we instructed our conveyancers within 48 hours of offer being accepted. The chain is nearly complete and the estate agents have been slightly less gung ho (nothing we're worried about, just a switch from all systems go to secure the sale) so the search process has started but we're going to hold off on booking the survey until the chain is complete. Hoping we've done the right thing, if not I guess it's just a lesson learned the hard way!

We waited until the chain was complete and after mortgage AIP/application. If you have no worries about mortgage approval, you can instruct solicitors as soon as the chain completes. Alternatively, you could wait for the offer to be received.

Do get the survey booked! There’s a lead time of 3-4 weeks where I live and that’s the slowest bit of the process so far.

If the chain doesn’t complete in time then provided you give a little bit of notice, you should be able to move the survey date.