Lack of contact from solicitors

[Honeybirds87]

I'd really appreciate some opinions on whether I'm being super needy here,

We are buying, mortgage offer expires on 23rd December. We have told everyone that we cannot afford the house if we need a new mortgage deal, the extra £400 in interest a month is not doable.

Our offer on the house was accepted in June and honestly its been so stressful. Mistake after mistake from the other side.

I've said I want to be able to sign and exchange next Tuesday (13th) for weeks and yet no one seems to give a shit. My solicitor says he is still waiting for replies to enquires from the other side. Says he'll let me know when he has some info but he never does

No one ever does. I'm sick of chasing people and feeling like no one cares. The customer service from everyone involved is shocking

What more can I do?

Gosh, you're not in Cardiff are you? My daughter had this happen between July 2021 and January 2022 when she finally gave up and withdrew from the sale. House buying never used to take this long, you must be so fed up.

Can you get the estate agents involved? They’ll want their fees so it’s in their interest to help push things along. If not you need to find a way of raising mighty hell until they (all of them) pay attention to you and your upcoming deadline.

We had a similar situation with the vendors solicitor being useless. Our vendors were elderly and obviously struggling, and the estate agents were actually very good at trying to manage the situation and at one point they had persuaded the vendors to find another solicitor, but the next day the sunk costs fallacy had pulled them back in and they went back to the useless ones who pratted about until they were actually closed down by the SRA the day before the first scheduled exchange. It took 15 months from offer acceptance to completion in the end.

@funnelfanjo that sounds awful

We're not in Cardiff. In England. I'm just at my wits end. The worst part is there just aren't any other homes available to us if we don't get this one. Because of interest rate hikes we'd need to look at spending 30/40k less and there just arent homes in the bracket here.

I'm going to go into the solicitors tomorrow but I already know they won't let me see my solicitor and will fob me off.

Buying a home has been the worst experience of my life and I just feel like it should be something enjoyable and exciting. When we had our offer accepted I never thought for a second we'd end up so close to the mortgage offer expiry.

And yes I've been on at the estate agents weekly but they are no better. I just constantly get "I've chased this today and will come back to you with a response". I've no idea what they actually mean by chasing it because nothing happens and I never hear back so I ask again and get the same response.

Really sympathise, that's what my daughter felt, she got her solicitors' fees refunded in part as they recognised how inept they had been which was amazing. Can you turn up in person maybe and bluff that you're thinking of bailing from the whole thing as your mortgage deadline is looming large now?

What are the outstanding queries?

I'm just thinking it's important to know who is dragging their feet so you know which approach to take.

I'm afraid you're going to have to get tough when they try and fob you off - if you meekly accept that then they'll push you to the back of the queue. Yes, customer service is crap, but you either have to battle your way through it or just passively give up.

Your two main areas of contact are your solicitors and the estate agent as a proxy for the vendor/their solicitor. For both of them then you're going to have to upgrade your weekly contact to daily at a minimum - when they say "we'll let you know our response" ask when that will be then ring morning and afternoon. Every day. Ask for names, contact the same person again and again and make it their problem until you get a response. Be cheerful, be calm, be polite, but be firm and clear on your deadline and what needs to happen. Being the squeaky wheel that they have to oil just to shut up up may just work.

Have you contacted your mortgage lender to see if they are willing to extend their offer at all? If you don't ask, you don't get. If you do get an extension, then for heavens sake DONT tell the vendors that until you have to, as your upcoming deadline is the only hard bargaining point you have to get things moving at the moment.

But your solicitor can't do a report to your mortgage company if they haven't had the responses. So until they are sent them they can't do anything.

Speak to your seller direct and let them know directly that if their solicitor doesn't respond to be able to complete in time for the offer expiry date they lose their buyer.

23rd of December! 😱

Do the sellers know this and are you in a chain?

I say because I can’t imagine people wanting that close to Xmas.

Really sorry op but it doesn’t sound like a goer.

I'm going to go into the solicitors tomorrow but I already know they won't let me see my solicitor and will fob me off.

Refuse to leave until your solicitor comes to see you. Tell them you're happy to wait as long as it takes. If they refuse, tell them you want to see a partner and ask that they check your file.

I worked at a solicitors and some conveyancing solicitors are really crap. I remember the head of conveyancing getting so fed up about a solicitor not responding that he walked down the road and sat in the office until the solicitor came to see him. It was mortifying for the solicitor who had been dodging him but it worked. Also have a look for the client care partner or something similar on the website. Ours was the managing partner and if it reached the stage of a client going to him we got a bollocking (assuming the fault was ours) and hounded daily until the matter was completed to the client's satisfaction.

I was in a similar position and did the unthinkable … I visited the sellers solicitor and complained in a loud voice in their reception (in front of waiting clients) that they’d been failing to respond to my solicitors letters and so I was going to withdraw from the transaction unless they responded in 24 hours. They claimed they hadn't received the letter, but I showed proof they were lying (again, in front of their clients). Everyone was outraged because ‘it’s just not done’ but strangely, everything moved quickly afterwards. 🤔

We have had some horrendous solicitors! I managed to find the buyers and tell them we were pulling out if they didn't sort out their solicitors (no one wants to lose money at this point). I've also rung the other solicitors in the chain too! Don't give up .... refuse to leave your solicitors until they see you. If you ask them to do something, tell them you will be ringing in x amount of time to check. Keep annoying and ringing until they respond!!

I was polite though, loud voice, not shouty and used the sentence ‘with all due respect, that’s just not true …

I love this @Jinglehop !

My DH bought his new build flat before we met and used the solicitors recommended by the developer. They were based somewhere up north several hours away. He's still convinced the solicitor and her secretary (who claimed she was always too busy when he called) were the same person!

You need to be chasing the estate agents more frequently than weekly.
On a "bad" day I can get 3 or 4 calls from the estate agents - we are hoping to complete the sale before Xmas too.
I email the solicitor if I have information - and that might be "other side are claiming not to have recieved XYZ, please can you resend". I call if I have to have a discussion with them - but have a pretty low success rate at getting connected, decent success with leaving messages with reception and getting a call back.

That said, depending on the enquiries, I'd think they are really going to have to pull out the stops to get exchanged next week if enquiries are still ongoing. Everyone is going to need to be on board to get it moving - have you asked what the latest completion the Solicitors will do is? Ours won't complete after lunch on the 21st.

Good luck. I've drunk more wine in the last month of this house sale than I have in the last year!

You may be able to negotiate an extension on your mortgage offer - the situation has improved considerably in the last month or so and new mortgage rates are coming in lower. A friend of mine completed 6 weeks ago and had been given a 1 month extension to the mortgage rate offered

My seller’s solicitor was shocking. The only way she’d do anything is if I threatened to withdraw from the sale, which I did twice - first time after we’d chased the draft contract for 11 (!) weeks, and last week for exchange. We complete on Thursday, finally!

What helped me cope was the realisation that it wouldn’t be the end of the world if this purchase didn’t happen. It would suck, and it would be a waste of money and time, but it’s not like we need to move. (I get that everyone’s situation is different though.) I just didn’t care anymore, and it was like a weight was lifted. As a bonus, when I started telling EA’s “actually, it’s not the end of the world if we spend a few more years in our current place”, hoo boy did they start bending over backwards to try to push my purchase (and sale) through. A little bit of “you’re not going to get paid” is a great motivator.

With mine it took an email to all involved (including the vendors' solicitors) saying "we complete by Christmas or it's game over" to get things moving. Mine has been going on since June and I had had enough of being told "we'll ask and get back to you" only to hear nothing for a week. That said, we still have outstanding enquiries so I think completing before Christmas is unlikely, but my mortgage offer expires in early January so we need to have at least exchanged by then.

@dubyalass I’ve been following your saga on the other thread, what a nightmare for you. I really feel it.

One thing, I don’t want to add to your worries but with my mortgage offer (Santander) we needed to complete - not exchange - by the deadline to lock in the rate. Yours may be different but you should check that, it would be horrible to push for exchange only to find you miss the deadline anyway.

You have to call your solicitor every day. Get a list of outstanding enquiries. Send it to the estate agent. Micro manage the resolution of every single enquiry. Make yourself such a pain in the backside that it gets done to get rid of you.

Happened to us but in July

we didn’t just do weekly contact - it was three times a day- morning, afternoon, end of evening every day

making it very very clear that our extended mortgage offer was about to expire - the seller could work out what that meant

you need to badger and badger some more

Thank you! Yes it would be completion before the deadline expires. I'm thinking I will need to apply for an extension anyway so will get that sorted next week, but there's nothing major outstanding as far as I can see, it's just solicitor capacity to physically get everything in place for exchange. And their solicitors actually doing stuff in a timely manner 🙄

Thank you for the replies, my original hope had been to complete and exchange on the same day as I had been told this is possible.

I've been on the phone again, still enquires outstanding but they have managed to get "the majority" back.

I think what annoys me most is the person who works at the estate agent works part time in a job share but won't give me access to her co-worker meaning I can only get through to her two days a week. I've sorted that out today though and said if the other person doesn't contact me tomorrow I will pull out. I don't even understand how these "chasers" at the estate agents earn a living they are useless.

I've been on to my mortgage advisor to try and get an extension but I know in my heart I will not use an extension on this house. If they don't sort it by next week then that's it. I'll be devastated but I'm sick of it all. I don't think I'm being unreasonable to want it sorted by 12th December when the offer was accepted at the beginning of June.

Thank you again for all the replies.

Sorry you're having this OP

I really hope they get on with it now.

your solicitor should tell you specifically which enquiries are outstanding, it might be something quick to sort.

Ask to see your file when you are at the Solicitors. You will be able to see the letters and emails your Solicitors have sent and the dates they were sent. Ask your Solicitor to ring the vendors Solicitor in front of you. Good luck op

OP don’t cut your nose to spite your face. If you get the extension then go for it. As you say with the rates rise you will have a smaller budget.

I would demand to speak to sellers direct. You still haven’t said about whether it’s a chain.

Everyone needs to agree a move date (completion). There’s solicitors not doing there work but there’s also sellers influence too.

It takes some time to find a removal company but they are probably not too busy pre Xmas as it’s not a popular move time.

You need to see whether everyone in the chain is onboard with your time schedule. They too can apply pressure from the other side.