Need to rant mostly, but sympathy or suggestions also acceptable!!
Selling a house on behalf of a family member who lives abroad and has dementia so can't answer any house related questions). Offer made and accepted by me at the end of May. Selling to a first time buyer. Since then in August they have asked me to reduce the price by £10k (not due to a bad survey or anything but they had over spent) I agreed to reduce by £5k.
It is now December. They are in absolutely no hurry to do anything, except ask questions that I don't have the answers to. They know the circumstances of the sale. They know that I don't live there, have never lived there and that the person who owns the house has no mental capacity, and yet, we are in a never ending cycle of their solicitor asking questions that I can't answer or that are totally irrelevant. Each time they ask a stupid question it takes their solicitor at least a week to put it to mine. They then take 24 hours to send it to me. I then respond within an hour and my solicitor (never going with an estate agent recommended one again) takes a few days to reply back to their solicitor who then takes another week to send it to the buyer, who then promptly thinks of another bullshit question to ask and do we begin the whole laborious fucking process again. It has been 7 months!!! Our estate agent spends ages trying to explain to them that they need to stop asking pointless questions, or ask them all in one go, but they just think of more each time.
The past 6 weeks they have asked me for FENSA certificates for the double glazing, fair enough, but they know as the property information states that the windows were put in in 2006, so any certificate is invalid by now anyway. Still I dig out the FENSA certificate which ran out in 2016, as they do after 10 years. Send it back.
Then two weeks later they ask when the boiler was last serviced. I have no idea and there is no paperwork anywhere which states that. I respond and they come back 2 weeks later asking if at any time in the last 40 years the water board have requested access to the house. I literally have no idea. They know I don't know this, but I get that they probably have to ask so I respond to say I don't know.
They then ask how much I pay annually for gas and electricity?! IDONT KNOW and even if I did, maybe my relative sat in the cold and dark every day and pud £100, maybe she walked around naked and had it like a sauna and it cost £20k, it's all bloody relative.
Today, I am ready to lose my shit at them...I'm currently paying gas and electricity to keep the house on the grid to stop any burst pipes etc, at a cost to me, as relative has no money to pay for it. Today, their solicitor emails to say that they are worried about the cold and that this might mean burst pipes and mould!!! That's it, I've lost my shit. If they got their fingers out their arses then they would be living there rather than thinking about it.
So I've now given them 10 days to exchange or I'm putting it back to market. I will never ever sell to a FTB ever again.
WTH is wrong with these people.? Why can they not get a list of all their questions and ask them all at once. Why does it take 7 months to think of yet another question? Why do they not understand the basic line "I've never lived in the house and the person that did doesn't have mental capacity"? Why won't they just bloody exchange?
After I issued my ultimatum they got their bloody mum to ring the estate agent to say it had upset them??!!!! Arrrggghhhhhh