Buying a house in Northern Ireland

[evilharpy]

I'm not a FTB but this is the first time I've bought a house in NI.

I had an offer accepted three weeks ago and instructed a solicitor the same day. We're looking to complete in August. Haven't heard anything from him since and am not sure how normal this is.

At what stage do you usually pay for your searches there - is it up front, or at the end along with the rest of the fees etc?

You should have been given a breakdown of costs from your solicitor after instructing them. We paid the bill in full at the end.

We paid in full at the end of the sale, but other solicitors may do it differently.

Just phoned for an update and apparently he's still waiting for any sort of contact at all from the other side and has chased several times. They send a letter of engagement etc when they've had the seller's bits and pieces in and have a bit more info. I've been given verbal confirmation of fees and rough breakdown of all the disbursements, he's the family's solicitor so I'm not too worried about being ripped off but just starting to get slightly concerned that nothing is happening.

It’s typical to pay everything at the end. An august completion seems unlikely, time-wise, as everything* shuts down here for two weeks in mid July, so all of the searches, surveys, won’t happen then.

*not everything, obv, but lots of administrative things take the same two week break.

Both sides seemed to think we'd be ok for an August completion but I know it might be a bit ambitious. I forgot all about the twelfth fortnight, poo.

I have just had another update though that the vendor's solicitor was waiting on the deeds and was going to send everything together, but he's going to send stuff piecemeal to speed things up, and the vendor is going in tomorrow to sort some bits out. So it has been progressing in the background. The agent is brilliant and phoned everyone today and kept chasing till she got answers and updates!