How long to find onward purchase

[readytosell]

How long do you think is reasonable to find an onward purchase?

A month? Two months? Longer?

Trying to gauge what most people would find acceptable, especially at the moment when it's so hard to find decent properties to buy without vicious bidding wars!

I guess it’s whatever is acceptable to your buyers. We accepted an offer in Feb and our buyers have indicated they are willing to wait until August. We still haven’t found anywhere though

That's really generous, @umbel are your buyers FTB?

My buyer has a FTB buying theirs, so chain is forming. I think I'm going to set myself a month deadline to find something which I don't feel is unreasonable, but some people seem more calm and others more stressed!

It has taken us 5 weeks to find somewhere and we have been lucky really. I had almost given up hope. I read that the average is 6 weeks to 8 months but that would have been in "normal" times 😄. The pace of the market puts on a lot of pressure to find somewhere quickly. We now have to wait for our vendors to find somewhere so we will have to be patient. Good luck!

@readytosell we are lucky in that they really want this house. It’s a small village and there are only a handful of similar properties, none of the others for sale. And yes, they are FTB.

We’re having real problems finding somewhere though - looking in a small area, with not much housing stock, and very little going up for sale. We’ve increased our search area considerably, we are really not being picky, and we have a realistic budget. We just want 4 beds (or 3 and an extra reception room) and a garden but no other make or break requirements. We’re not put off by cosmetic work. We don’t mind if it’s terrace, semi or detached, or even a bungalow. Even so, in that time there have only been about 6 properties that would have been suitable - 1 we were not allowed to view as they already had too much interest, 2 that turned out to need major structural work, 1 we could not put an offer in because that already had too many other offers (within 24 hours of viewing), 1 that had complicated and off-putting freehold arrangements and 1 that was stupidly overpriced (but still sold in 2 days). Everything is either too small (and under budget) or enormous (and over budget).

Things seem to have picked up a little over the last week or so, but I am feeling a bit hopeless! The good news is we have somewhere we can move to once we get an offer accepted, so would not need to wait for a chain to form.

Totally depends on everyone's circumstances!

As a buyer, I think 3-6 (maybe 8) weeks is reasonable. Once my place was under offer, I found somewhere in 3 weeks as did not want to lose my buyers, I think I could have taken maybe 2-3 more weeks if needed

OTOH - family sold a house & buyers let them have an extra 6 months to look (as were not in a rush & wanted to renovate)

@umbel: its great that you can move & break the chain. I'd just keep the communication going with your buyers to see what timing they are working to

I found a place within a couple weeks of accepting an offer. I'm moving 70 miles away so had to carefully choose which to view.
Unfortunately, despite being told the seller would go into rental, she then decided she wouldn't and after two months I started looking again (I had searches back, survey done etc). It's now been almost three months since vendor accepted my offer and they are still looking, but I'm now buying something else which was advertised as chainfree. If I miss the stamp duty because of first vendor I'll be mad, and feel she should have made it clear from the start that she would not vacate before finding another property. She now has to start over finding a new buyer.

Thanks all, so 4 weeks or so doesn't seem massively unreasonable. I mean obviously hope I will find something sooner, got quite a few bookings viewed in next week with quite a few compromise places.

For me it would be a maximum of 4 weeks. It took us a week and a half to find ours. But once I decide I want to move house I want things to move as quickly as possible.