Buyers Sellers Roll Call 16

[Househunting21]

Because the last thread is nearly full and I for one very much appreciate the space to vent

Good luck to everyone hoping to exchange and/or complete this week!

Not really, @Getyourarseofffthequattro - we have been struggling with this since April, and have had lots of time when nothing happened, and lots of last minute stuff happening this week. Didnt help my solicitor was off last week and no one really covered for her. So in fact it has all been very stressful and I have been living in chaos for over a month (survey showed some major work needed, had to live in among it so have had stuff in boxes for about 6 weeks). Cant believe the end is in sight though!

@Dontwatchfootball

Not really, *@Getyourarseofffthequattro* - we have been struggling with this since April, and have had lots of time when nothing happened, and lots of last minute stuff happening this week. Didnt help my solicitor was off last week and no one really covered for her. So in fact it has all been very stressful and I have been living in chaos for over a month (survey showed some major work needed, had to live in among it so have had stuff in boxes for about 6 weeks). Cant believe the end is in sight though!

Oh blimey! At the very least then you deserved a short time between exchange and completion! Good luck with your move!

Thanks!!!!!

I’ve not been on here for a couple of months. Our situation is we accepted an offer on our house in June 2020 (!) and had an offer accepted on a purchase in July 2020. Chain of 6. Lots of delays due to incompetent and slow solicitors. The chain was finally ready in February 2021 but then the top of the chain started playing games which lasted for 4 months before someone further up pulled out. These vendors had an offer accepted on a no onward chain fairly quickly and rest of the chain below them said they would wait. This was 10 weeks ago. I chased today and the estate agent has said there is one remaining query and then a date can be agreed which is great news. The query is something to do with the ground rent (long leasehold house) and they are awaiting a response from the management company. I’ve googled and it seems like management companies are notoriously bad at providing information and it can really delay things. As a result I am now worrying about that it will lead to further delays. I feel like I’m never going to get into this house!!

@Dontwatchfootball that’s brilliant news. We exchanged today as well, it’s a great feeling, isn’t it?

Thanks @TakeYourFinalPosition , its so infuriating when you don't hear back from Solicitors/EA etc. Hope you hear something today.

Fingers crossed for you too @TashieWoo. I been just about keeping on top of my urge to buy stuff for the new place! I have, however, favourited about a million things on my various online shopping accounts!

Congrats to @AchillesLastStand and @Dontwatchfootball

*I have been

Good luck @TashieWoo!

@ZimZamZoom Thanks . I called again early this morning and got told our solicitor was busy again... I must have sounded irrate enough, as she's now emailed to say it's manic in the office at the moment but she's going to look at our file today.

She doesn't seem very on top of what is happening, which is the worrying bit. I sort-of agree with our sellers' estate agent now, it's bizarre that nobody knows what is happening with our buyers' mortgage offer or anything, this far down the line.

I've still got my fingers crossed that it's just an error somewhere and they're going to come back and say we're pretty much ready to go soon... I'm dying to start buying things for the house. The urge to nest is real this week!

Still no news here. Getting annoyed to be honest. Nothing seems to happen unless I chase it up. They all ought to be paying me let alone me paying them

@TakeYourFinalPosition and @Getyourarseofffthequattro - I had the same thing, only complete with arsey receptionist at the solicitors office when I called to find out what was going on. Seemed like they do everything at the last minute unless you force them to hurry up.

It's so frustrating isn't it. Luckily I haven't had any run ins with arsey receptionists (yet!) But nothing seems to happen until I email and then magically "oh that arrived today" oh really did it. Course it did. Weird how that happens every time!

@Getyourarseofffthequattro

Still no news here. Getting annoyed to be honest. Nothing seems to happen unless I chase it up. They all ought to be paying me let alone me paying them

I know it’s one of the most stressful and most expensive processes to go through and I’ve said to my OH countless times they should be giving us money for the amount of time I’ve spent on the phone. Hang in there, you will get there!

Thank you @TakeYourFinalPosition - I’m sorry you’re having such a frustrating time and I don’t get why your buyer is being obstructive, surely they want to move! Hopefully when your solicitor is back from
Holiday things will start moving a bit more quickly.

I've had a response from our solicitor saying it will take over a week for our buyers solicitor to accept our indemnity policy "because covid" maybe I'm being ignorant but why does it take a week to read the blurb of s policy and decide whether it's sufficient?! And what the actual fuck has covid got to do with it?!

@Getyourarseofffthequattro because ‘because COVID’ has become a byword for ‘you’re gonna get shit service coz we just can’t be arsed to implement things for over a year’.
Absolutely no excuse for it now - there’s been plenty of time - I wouldn’t get away with using that excuse at work.
Our solicitor was very quick off the mark with saying that the Indemnity for one of our enquiries was not suitable - took her less than 24 hours. It also took her less than 24 hours to read thru x3, check with her colleagues and approve something else - that had 50odd pages.

My sellers lawyers send a standard email every time they are contacted saying due to being very busy we will get back to you in 3-5 days. WTF how do they get away with this shit? I presume they are cheap or something? I’d rather pay for a proper service.

I don’t get it either… we are far from being in lockdown and the furlough scheme shouldn’t be needed now so I think they should be back to normal. We are all busy. If I had a standard email response like that I wouldn’t last long in my job!

From reading these posts and my own experience I think a good, proactive solicitor is worth their weight in gold, but unfortunately it’s difficult to find out whether you have a less competent one until you’re already working with them.

Exactly! I said to dp last night if I said that id have been sacked and I get paid much much less than a solicitor does.

Ours seems okay at doing her bit but I get the impression that she doesn't chase the other solicitors like she's "above" that.

I'm sick of it to be honest. I don't want to have to live apart from dp for weeks on end to be honest and even though I've explained the situation to her she refuses to even give me a rough guideline of how long is left. I feel like pulling out the whole thing and being like well fuck you all to be honest.

I'm with you all on feeling like I should be the one being paid, rather than the one paying!

Nothing further from our solicitor after she emailed yesterday saying she'd look at it yesterday.

My husband has used our solicitors before and found them great then, so it's weird that they're so rubbish now. I suspect it's less Covid and furlough and more that they've been manic throughout the stamp duty holiday and are feeling overworked and taking as much leave as possible, which is making it hard to move things along. In the last 5 weeks, either our solicitor or our buyer's has been on holiday for 3 weeks in total.

I am also experiencing things taking absolutely ages with solicitors. Am getting a bit worried now that someone in the chain might not be able to proceed after September 30th stamp duty deadline.

Now just found out our purchase doesnt have building regs for two load bearing walls being removed and a log burner being installed. Our solicitor "told" is this by copying me into an email to the sellers solicitor asking for an indemnity policy. Well hang on what if we aren't happy with it?!

She told to me to speak to the estate agent if I'm not happy with it. Estate agent was totally bemused. She did say she'd find out if the buyers had done any additional checks on either when they bought it.

Dp did some digging and looks like walls were removed approx 7 years ago, log burner installed maybe 5 years ago.

Not sure what to do now. I imagine the walls are fine. No evidence of any movement and presumably if they were gonna fall down they'd do so within 7 years.

Really want the log burner checking over though because I don't want to carbon monoxide us all to death.

I'm really stressed. Just found out just before exchange that neighbouring houses have a right to dry laundry on my parking space. Apparently they have never exercised the right in past 40 years that vendor has lived there but I'm not convinced by that. Don't feel I can pull out but I'm really not happy about it. So fed up. Bit peeved with my solicitor too, who is now on leave after dumping that info on me last minute!
Argh!

@flashbac

I'm really stressed. Just found out just before exchange that neighbouring houses have a right to dry laundry on my parking space. Apparently they have never exercised the right in past 40 years that vendor has lived there but I'm not convinced by that. Don't feel I can pull out but I'm really not happy about it. So fed up. Bit peeved with my solicitor too, who is now on leave after dumping that info on me last minute! Argh!

We had this in our last house, similarly they had never used it. In the end our was essentially void because it said they could only hand laundry from "pole 2" and "pole 3" neither of which existed. Do you know the exact wording of it?

@Getyourarseofffthequattro

Wording is vague. Refers to the right of neighbouring properties to dry clothes in yard to south east of property. I'm hoping the vague wording works in my favour but maybe it doesn't...

[quote flashbac]@Getyourarseofffthequattro

Wording is vague. Refers to the right of neighbouring properties to dry clothes in yard to south east of property. I'm hoping the vague wording works in my favour but maybe it doesn't...[/quote]
Hmm that's strange. It's a hard one isn't it because why would they start hanging their washing out now after so long, but I suppose there is always the chance that they could. Ime most people do not want to hang their washing in someone else's private yard.
Is there anything you can do to have it removed like get agreement from neighbours to give up their rights? I don't even know if that's a thing you can do but if they don't use it you'd think they'd be agreeable.