How long do you give it to find the right house?

[cinnamonandnutmeg]

DH and I have accepted an offer on our house. Unfortunately the two houses we really liked have both been sold while we were waiting. There are a few other places that seem nice enough, but nothing that jumps out at us.

When we bought our first house we were very limited by location and by price. It was the best we could have hoped for with the restrictions we had, and we felt very lucky to get it. Now we can afford to be a bit more choosy and we don't want to settle for something that's just OK. We also don't want to keep our buyer waiting too long and risk losing the sale. She wants to move as soon as possible after Christmas. What sort of timeframe do most people give themselves to find a place they really like?

I would say at least 3-6 months.. it can take longer. More so now given the market is rather stagnant (depends on area you are looking?!)

I think you'd be lucky to find a buyer willing to wait months!

If your buyer is keen to move quickly then I think around 6 weeks is reasonable. What if you find a house but then your sellers also need an onward purchase?

As a buyer, I'd not like to wait much longer than 6 weeks to start the conveyancing process, and I wouldn't start searches/enquiries/survey until the chain was complete.

It depends on the market how long you can reasonably keep a Buyer waiting but in this current Buyers market, I would be very worried about them getting tired of waiting and buying somewhere else, or trying to reduce the price if the sale drags on more than a few months.

I would set myself a target of finding somewhere before Christmas and if that doesn’t work out, start considering the option of moving into a rented property for a few months so the sale can proceed. Otherwise you may find yourself back to square one.

Now you have a Buyer you are in a strong position yourself so may be able to negotiate a good price on a purchase, if you can find anything suitable.

Completely agree - I wouldn’t be willing to wait very long as a buyer. It’s such a tricky set of circumstances to balance - I’d seen a house I loved and was against the clock to go under offer before it did. I was unsure what I’d do if I missed that particular house as I hadn’t seen anything else I liked as much - I decided I’d probably try looking for 6-8 weeks and if I hadn’t found anything would probably pull out of the whole thing as the pressure to make a decision would be really stressful!

It depends how unique the house you’re selling is - if the buyers can go straight to another that’s not going to make them hang around then you will lose them.

I’ve just sold my house after a year on the market and had two lined up to offer on (that I liked equally) and my buyers were pressuring me substantially even though it took me less than a week to get my offer validated and accepted. (It was a close thing - one of the two wouldn’t budge on price and was very overpriced; the other was already negotiating with another buyer. I managed to jump into the latter purely because I’d met the seller and my DDs had charmed her, whereas their other buyer wanted to sell half the garden to a developer)

Just sell quickly and then rent, or move in with parents, or, as friends did, buy an old camping trailer and move to a campsite until the right house comes up. It might need work anyway, so it will be good to have somewhere to stay while the most dusty/disruptive work is done.

It sounds as if renting would be the best way to go if we don't find anywhere we like quickly. We've already put quite a lot of our stuff into storage so we don't have to hang about.

We went to view a house on Friday that turned out to be a tenanted HMO. The ad conveniently forgot to mention this. It just said "available with no onward chain". The hallway and common areas reeked of damp. I noticed the tenants had portable electric heaters in their rooms, and when I felt the radiator, it was stone cold. We found out the boiler is set to a timer that the tenants have no control over. The estate agent evidently realised that we were bothered, but he attributed our annoyance to the wrong thing. "Don't worry, it's being sold as vacant possession, so they'll be gone when you buy it!" Err, no thanks.

We have two other houses to see on Tuesday that will hopefully be better, and that are definitely in the most convenient area of any we've looked at so far, so fingers crossed.

Where are you looking to buy ?

Given market condition (i.e volume half what they normally are), this is going to be an ongoing issue. And there isn’t much you can do unless you re ready to buy a house you don’t like to please your buyer. Ultimately, unless you sold for a higher mark than where the market is now, you will just find another buyer should you lose your current one.

We've sold twice before finding something to buy, and gone into rentals each time. I certainly wouldn't risk losing your buyer.

So much is dependent on the local area, as others have said. One factor to consider is the state of the rental market - would you struggle to find somewhere suitable to rent for what could be 6 months or more?

Hopefully one of the houses you are viewing on Tuesday will be just what you are looking for.

Who are your buyers selling their house to? Is there another link in the chain who has already been waiting months to get to this stage?

In 2020 we waited on our vendors for 5 months as we thought their house was ‘the one’ although they couldn’t find a new property they later confessed they were waiting on one street in the town. The chain beneath was getting incredibly impatient, mortgage offers were running out, we were all massively stressed and vendor refused to go into rental, so we had to bail. We moved quickly to an ‘ok’ house in order to keep the chain afloat in what was a hectic market.

Sometimes it just doesn’t work out ideally and you have to play in tune with the rest of the chain to get a result. With the current shortage of properties I expect everyone’s having to compromise on on a few preferences.

I don’t expect much to come on now before Christmas as people just don’t want a tonne of viewings when they’re in wind down mode. We are doing a second viewing on Thursday and I’m praying Dh likes it or we just need to wait until the new year.

Move into a rental and go from there, it took us 18 months.