How long has your house purchase taken [so far]??

[dubyalass]

I had an offer accepted in mid-June; no chain. I've had my mortgage offer through and the survey done. There is an issue with ownership of an outbuilding so the vendors are sorting that out with the Land Registry. Searches not done yet but unlikely to be anything tricky there.

I'm hoping that I might be in by the end of October but realistically who knows. I've no idea how long the LR are taking to process casework at the moment. Once that's sorted it should all be pretty quick.

4 months and counting. Chain free. We're the buyers. Solicitors on both sides just seem very slow; we're in direct contact with the seller and she shares our frustration.

Forced solicitors to do the searches before the mortgage offer came in. But it's just not moving anywhere. Latest issue is that the vendor is moving to a small lodge at the bottom of the garden which she extended and fenced off part of the garden of the property we're buying. A transfer of part wasn't done at the time as her solicitor said she could just sort that when she sold the main house.

We noticed the title plan and the plans on some of the searches had different boundaries so queried with solicitor. They're now arguing with the other solicitor as to whom is responsible for the costs of sorting out the transfer of part. We've told them we're not paying for it; as far as we're aware we were always just buying the plot as per the garden wall & fences.

But the saga continues, haven't heard back from solicitor in almost 2 weeks now and were still no closer to exchange or even setting a completion date.

On the upside it's giving us time to get quotes in for some of the work that was flagged as urgent on the survey.

There's a huge back log at the land registry and searches are taking ages. It really does depend on all those things and all the solicitors involved. It sounds like you've made good progress though in terms of the paper work side, shouldn't be too long now x

Offer accept 23rd January, pulled out 23rd August due to lack of progress on vendors side 🙄

Ours took 5months, just for the purchase. (We'd already sold) Chain of three. We tried our best to push through ASAP but the sellers and their nobhead solicitors were awful. Promised to break their chain and reneged on this.
I'm never moving again after that. All the best with the move OP.

Quick update for me: absolutely no progress whatsoever since my last post. I thought things were moving forward but turns out I misread the email from my solicitors and the Land Registry issue still isn’t sorted. My mortgage broker has been on to my solicitors but heard nothing back. I’m not being chased by the vendors at least (the hold up is on their side but is due to something being missed during conveyancing last time round).

It’s utterly tedious and we haven’t even commissioned searches yet as there are still questions over the title. My solicitors are crap at communicating and when I chase them up I’m made to feel like I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m at the point of emailing everyone involved to ask WTF is going on but I’m going to give it one more week before throwing my toys out of the pram. Ironically the only reason anyone knows about the title problem is because I spotted it, not the vendors or anyone’ solicitors!

Slow, slow, quick quick slow here.
Two months in, a chain of 3. My buyers have an "unbelievably slow" solicitor ( my sales progressor's words) and have only just got the searches back, with no enquiries raised yet. Everyone who can is chasing them
The top of the chain want to start talking possible exchange dates. It all feels a bit unbalanced

But we're all trundling along and everyone ( so far) is being very cooperative.

But it's frustrating... too soon to pack and too late to do much else

Not much to update here either. Had our buyers enquiries mid August, responded same day, my solicitor sent them back a couple days later. Sent our enquiries the same day, no response from sellers solicitor yet.

Our mortgage offer ends beginning November, I'm getting twitchy!

We offered and got offer accepted 18th November and got the keys 19th January.

Offer accepted beginning of June, moving in a week so 4mths on a chain of 3!

Viewed end of April, offer accepted and mortgage sorted first week in May.
Still bloody waiting 😡 searches took ages but we've had them back for weeks. Our solicitor is blaming them but I think they're both a bit useless. No chain, we're buying from rented and she doesn't have a forward purchase.
Spoke to sellers EA on Friday and told them we have 6 weeks left on our mortgage offer and if it's not sorted by then it's unlikely we will continue with the sale. Hopefully that will put a rocket up someone's arse.
It's absolutely ridiculous how long it's taking.

@blibblibs I feel your pain. My mortgage offer is valid until early January but I will be furious if I'm not in by Christmas - my offer was accepted in mid June. I've replied quickly to any queries so far, had mortgage offer and survey sorted within the first few weeks but nobody else seems to be in any hurry whatsoever.

Our mortgage is valid until early January like you, our offer was accepted Easter weekend but it got automatically extended when we negotiated on price. Can’t extend without a guaranteed end in sight which we don’t have.

We were meant to complete early august. Every week our solicitor chases the sellers solicitors who claims to be chasing the solicitor for the person at the top of the chain. If we complain about the lack of timeframe and say we’re on a deadline the seller’s solicitor says their client needs to move as they can’t get up the stairs…but then do nothing. 2+ months on for discovering top of the chain has no POA and no one knows if they can just register the form or if it needs court intervention. No consideration of any alternative.

We went to see the estate agent a few weeks ago and said we were going to look at other properties & pull out if we found something new. I’ve hated everything we’ve seen so far.

Just over 3 months.

Thank you for this thread, it's made me realise the top of our chain have unrealistic expectations.

We accepted an offer on our house at the beginning of June, and then had an offer accepted on a new house mid June. We have all searches etc completed but our mortgage company are taking forever. They keep coming back to us asking for more bank statements, payslips etc as it's taking so long to review things it's onto the next month so they want the next lot. It's been really frustrating for us but we're hoping they're done now and should have our mortgage offer within the next week. Had a very shitty phone call from the estate agents last week all eye rolly and huffing and puffing at the situation, as the top of the chain (ones above our sellers - vacant property) are apparently threatening to pull out and put their house back on the market because it's all taking too long. Can't imagine they will be able to relist, find a buyer, and complete quicker than if they just wait a few more weeks at most so it's clearly just a scare tactic but still irritating none the less.

What's more annoying is that when we spoke to the manager of the estate agents when we first viewed the new house, he said things are taking an average of 4 months, so don't know who is managing the seller expectations.

Next door but one to us took almost a year from offer accepted to completion, they only moved in a few months ago.

We're a chain of 4 btw and no one is in a particular hurry as far as we are concerned. Our buyer is a landlord and our friends will be the new tenants, we have loads of work to do to the new property we are buying before we can even move in anyway and the couple we're buying from are downsizing to a vacant bungalow.

We are still no further to when I posted last time 🤷🏻‍♀️

3 months for us. No chain, cash buyers. It did feel long but I had never bought a house in this country so perhaps my expectations were skewed.
Friend of mine bought a house in 4 weeks but that was a condition imposed by the seller as he wanted a quick sale. She paid the asking price.

@JumpinJacques we had very impatient buyers for our house last year - it ended up going from offer accepted to completion in 30 days.

But whilst technically this is possible with solicitors who are on the ball, they were chain-free cash buyers who already had searches complete (as had been going to buy nearby house previously) and we were chain-free as going into rented and had already moved out. And our house was in good condition so survey didn't bring any surprises. So it couldn't have been a more straightforward transaction.

Trouble is, the EAs tend to say what they think you want to hear so is probably sucking up to the ones at the top of your chain instead of encouraging them to manage their expectations. They're in a chain and that has to move at the speed of the slowest person.

offer accepted on our house Mar; found onward house in May (took us 6 weeks); hopefully completing next week. Never moving again

Offered start of August, keys mid October last year! Chain free but with a mortgage

I can now update! We accepted an offer towards the end of Feb and had our offer accepted early March. Completed mid-September. It was a long time but apparently not that unusual.

Although saying that we've just saved ourselves 6k in stamp duty so it's a blessing really .

I really think that the time to completion has increased substantially in the past 9 months or so.

It seems (anecdotally, and what EA/solicitors are saying) that the backlog of work (including a LOT of people wanting new mortgages) is enormous and this is slowing the process for everyone, regardless of how simple the chains are.

I know several people who sold and completed last summer/autumn and took far less time than this, even in the mad sellers market it was then.

Four months and counting for me. Offer accepted end of May. No chain. I'm moving from rented and the seller isn't buying anywhere else. Hoping to complete on 30 Sept... Should hopefully find out tomorrow if that date works!

I am a FTB in rented and had offer accepted on a property April 2022.
Had to then wait for the chain to complete, ended up completing mid August. We then instructed our solicitors immediately and are now 6 weeks into the process. We haven’t heard anything since we paid for the searches to be done, which was 5 weeks ago and the local authority are currently taking 3 weeks supposedly. Might give the solicitors/EA a call to see if there’s any update. No idea what anyone else in the chain is doing if anything. Our mortgage offer expires early November and we’ve already resolved ourselves to the fact we will need to reapply…