FTB here. Currently at end of tether and need to vent!
Had an offer accepted on a house this week (hurrah!) and both estate agents and solicitors now want to carry out ID and money laundering checks. So far, so normal, right?
But now everything for these checks is outsourced and has to be done using an app, apparently. Solicitors and estate agents each use different apps with different requirements. This is making the whole thing about 100 times more complicated than it needs to be.
Problem no. 1 - DP is paranoid about security/privacy and so doesn't have a smartphone. This does not compute with our solicitors who insist we both have to go via the app. They've suggested that we both use the app on my smartphone, but the login ID is somehow tied to the phone itself and so that's a non-starter as we can't create two different user accounts on the app even if we uninstall and reinstall it. (Thankfully estate agents' app DID allow two separate accounts on the same phone, so that's that one dealt with, at least.)
Problem no. 2 - smartphone app for money laundering checks requires me to connect to online banking to verify existence of funds. But some funds are coming from DP's account (which I don't have access to on my phone) and others are coming from my savings account whose existence the app simply fails to recognise even though it's with a major high street bank...
Probs 1 and 2 could be sorted easily if we just presented paper documents - all of which we have - but solicitors don't seem to want to let us do that even though we live within walking distance to their offices! Argh!
Problem no. 3 - estate agent won't accept the same documents as proof of address as our solicitors. e.g. tax coding notice is accepted by our solicitors and our lenders, but estate agent says that their compliance department won't accept it?! We've pointed this out to them but we just get "computer says no". (We can produce other proofs but it's the principle of the thing!)
Add to that the fact that the EA won't officially take the house of the market until our solicitors have completed their own ID & money laundering checks and my stress levels are at an all time high. Would be inclined to find alternative solicitors if it weren't for the fact that (a) these ones do seem to be highly regarded locally even though they're making it bloody difficult to instruct them and (b) switching would introduce yet another delay to the process!
Why does the EA need to do these checks anyway? They're not handling any of the monies for the transaction and I thought that's what the solicitors were for... everyone I've spoken to (including those who've bought recently) said it wasn't this complicated for them. They had to produce ID & proof of funds to the EA but it was a cursory check and not dependent on what the solicitors did.
Anyone else had anything similar?