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.

How has this happened? From everything I’ve read online, if you’ve had an official mortgage offer in writing the offer cannot be pulled like that if the property you’re buying is a standard residential home, not a buy to let etc.

GraceJonesBiggestFan this is our fear.
Offer runs out in 12 Nov but we've told them if we're not done by 28 Oct we won't be proceeding! We will until the final day if the offer is on the table from the bank but they've been so useless I want to give ourselves a bit of wiggle room.
I started mentioning our offer date about 6 weeks ago and was told not to worry, it would all be fine.
I'm so unbelievably pissed off with the whole process, if I did my job this badly I wouldn't still have it!
Fingers crossed they all get moving and it gets done in time for you.

@GraceJonesBiggestFan

Sorry I just went back a page and saw you’re in a discretionary one month extension on your offer so maybe that’s how they have got away with cutting it short.

(PS this is a shameless name change fail I am actually @movingonup2022 🙈)

According to our broker they can because the “offer” of a mortgage on the property still stands until 30th October - but the “product” (the interest rate) is being pulled from the 20th. So Santander claims they’re still fulfilling their “offer” to loan us the money - just at double the interest rate.

Oh blimey @GraceJonesBiggestFan , mine is a five-year fix at 2.65%. Better brace myself then.

Surely this alone will cause a crash? I could afford mine at 5.99% but I'd rather pull out and buy a cheaper house.

Just under 6 months.

Omg this is giving me huge anxiety now haha

I hate weekends since buying this house buying malarkey as nothing can ever move on or happen until the next working day. Just want to exchange NOW and get a completion date set in stone so I know everything is going ahead and can then contemplate giving notice on my current rented house

I hate the weekends aswel , I'm always hopeful for some news on Monday . Still nothing 😩

They are still fulfilling their offer, but as credit market/mortgage pricing conditions have changed they have to offer it at the current market rate, a bit like when they substitute products in a Tesco delivery but with bigger numbers.

ARGH! After busting a gut and returning all my paperwork really quickly, today I discover my buyers solicitor ( who had my responses to enquiries a fortnight ago) hasn't even looked at them yet, despite repeated requests from my solicitor and sales progressor. They will "try to get them to the top of the pile". No timescale defined.

Slow does not describe them...and I want my buyers to hassle them too. I would, if I'd employed them.

I'm feeling hugely frustrated with the process today.

We’ve made precisely zero progress since my post late August. We’re still waiting indefinitely for the seller at the top of our chain of three to gain POA. Now when asked for a timeline they say “it takes as long as it takes”. A chocolate teapot would be a more useful solicitor.

We’re chasing every week and I’ve taken to turning up in the estate agents unannounced to say gloomy things about the whole chain collapsing if our mortgage offer expires. Nothing makes a blind bit of difference. Everybody I know buying has completed, even if they offered after we did.

We did start looking at other properties but prices had risen since our original offer in April and we’ve been spooked by the last few weeks. So we’re sitting tight and seeing what happens. Our mortgage repayments will be £600 more per month (60% increase) if we have to take a new mortgage offer but a fall in prices could partially mitigate that. If the market continues in the same direction (lots of reductions, houses sitting unsold for weeks) we’ll make a hardball offer after our mortgage expires and walk if they won’t negotiate.

Weirdly I’m past caring now, it’s all terrible whichever way I slice it. I hope St Anne sorts out all our sales!

Big update on ours today (I think! I hope!). The freehold issue is resolved so we can proceed. Solicitor seems happy, is reporting to us this week and we are talking mid-November completion 🤞🏻

Good to hear one of us has had some progress . We are still at the chasing up enquiries stage . It's boring and if we run past late November I'm not moving until January.

Our enquiries seemed to last forever @Bedsheets4knickers. First raised enquiries end July and only just resolved today. Felt a bit bad as our solicitor was insisting the seller’s solicitor was crap and “like talking to a brick wall”, but when she escalated the paperwork to her director it turned out to just be a particularly rare arrangement of paperwork. 😳

oh well, I don’t feel too bad, being needy and harassing the estate agent seems to have focussed minds!

We’ve heard nothing since we paid our exchange deposit and handed in signed contract on Friday. However it’s only been two days because of the stupid weekend. Feels like forever. Called the solicitor last night but they’d already left for the day so left a message and sent an email asking for an update… we’re getting married and going on honeymoon over the next couple of weeks and it’d have been amazing to have a rough exchange date, or have exchanged even, before that date. We suggested 4th November as our ideal completion date but who knows if that is realistic now..

I'm now on the daily calls. My vendor is happy and both my solicitor and his have said we could be done by the end of this month. Just my buyers solicitor is very slow in returning info, they've had the last document for almost 3 weeks now, all they need to do is say they're happy with it and my sale is complete.

So my estate agent, my solicitor AND my vendors estate agent are chasing them l. I think me saying I will be pulling out of both sale and purchase if our mortgage offer expires before completion helped.

We're a chain of 3 ftb, us and our vendor who isn't buying onwards. This has been ongoing since the start of June....

I had a placatory call from the agent on Saturday after I sent an arsey email on Friday because nobody was returning my calls. Agent said they'd chase the third party solicitors who are holding things up on Monday and let me know what's going on. I said if no significant progress by this Friday I would start looking at other houses.

So of course nobody's rung me back yet to say whether they've chased them. In limbo again. Shame there's nothing else I'm interested in viewing!

I’m on 7 weeks and 6 days (technically, but really it’s longer) and I have an 8 week deadline. F*cking “modern auction method”. I’ve been ready for 3 weeks, but the ONE time I got the selling agent to call me back she said “oh no, the sellers solicitor will be working to complete on the deadline date”. Well it’s not the seller who loses £6k if it doesn’t complete 😤 the seller still doesn’t have a redemption statement from their lender apparently.

Finally, we're talking dates! However, it's taken 3 days of email ping-pong so far and still we can't find a completion date agreeable to all. Our buyer's estate agent has been amazing at liaising with all involved and pushing where needed. I contacted them directly - I wish I'd done this sooner! Hope we agree a mutually convenient date tomorrow!

We're moving tomorrow. It's been 9 hideous months. Everything takes twice or three times as long as it should - surveyors forget or get stuck in traffic - and that's another week gone. Solicitors go AWOL. Buyers and sellers procrastinate and clearly don't understand how the system works. We've been ready to move since July.

I reckon there needs to be a 'moving planner' - like a wedding planner only for moving house. Someone who can liaise between EAs, solicitors, buyers, sellers - and surveyors if necessary. And someone who can explain what is going on to all parties.

I would get my solicitor to do the searches - I know it's money down the drain if it all goes pear shaped but I think you need to order them because they can take ages.

DP spoke to the EA last thing yesterday who said something about "aiming to complete by 18th October" DP didn't think to query the fact that the 18th is 5 days away and we haven't even exchanged yet so he must be mistaken. Our solicitor says they're still waiting to hear from vendors solicitor re: exchanging. The EA may have meant completion 18th November but that's odd as it's a Saturday so maybe they meant 18th October to exchange. Yet another day and nearly another week over...

So the estate agent didn't ring me back on Monday, so I chased again yesterday. "Yes we'll chase them today". Heard nothing since. So, back to Rightmove it is - not going to pull out (yet) but I am going to book in some viewings. One house of vague interest is on with the same agent, who might refuse me a viewing, at which point they will feel the full force of my wrath.

Moral of this story: pay the £3 for the title plan as soon as your offer is accepted, and if there's anything missing, such as a garage, check if it has its own title and who it's registered to. If there are any anomalies, my advice right now would be to run to the hills because anything needing changes at the Land Registry or involving a third party and their solicitors will delay your purchase by months and months.