Name change so I don’t out myself to anyone who may be potentially linked to this, and sorry it’s a novel but I don’t want to dripfeed.
TLDR; we’re getting a lot of pressure from further up the chain to speed things up with the purchase of our (hopeful) new home, they are making us out to be the ones holding things up but I think they are being unreasonable and everything feels like it’s moving along as it should.
We are in the middle of the process of buying a new house. This house is in a chain of 3 other properties, which means including the sellers of the house we are buying and ourselves, there are 5 parties involved. We would complete this chain, with the caveat that we are at the tail end of selling our own property. We don’t need everything to align in terms of exchange/completion because we have somewhere to go once our sale completes, and can wait for however long it takes to coordinate our onward purchase in the chain. We do however need the proceeds of our sale to put into the deposit for our purchase.
Our sale I would say is 90% of the way there, just one little thing left to resolve. This is all in hand, but we can’t guarantee a timeframe because we need to get the lead time from a third party, and we’ve not heard back on that yet. Once we know a timeframe, we can agree an exchange/completion date with our buyer. I am optimistically hoping that everything to do with the sale will be done and dusted before the end of March, but it is also entirely possible that this could be wrapped up by the first week of March.
Meanwhile, for our purchase, we instructed our solicitors and started the buying process (i.e. homebuyer’s survey, mortgage application, specialist surveys like drainage, electrics, etc) in mid-December. We also had to renegotiate our offer just before Christmas due to lenders valuing the property to be a good chunk less than our original offer. The final price was agreed just before everyone broke up for Christmas break. Our solicitor received the draft contract in the second week of January and went back to the sellers’ solicitors with queries based on the contract and searches last week. In my opinion this is all ticking along at the expected pace.
However we have been hassled by the estate agent (let’s call him Greg) at the very top of the chain for weeks, who is also pestering the estate agent (let’s call her Betty) dealing with the sale of the property we’ve offered on, who in turn is passing on to us these questions and emphasising the pressure she is receiving from further up the chain. I don’t blame Betty whatsoever as this must be frustrating for her too, but I feel like Greg is being completely out of line? He has sent us physical letters to our home pressuring us to contact him directly about “major issues about the chain” (which, by the way, he meant us and the sale of our property). He has also been bombarding our solicitor with emails and phone calls trying to get “updates” even though things are progressing as planned. Our solicitor has told Greg to back off and all is going at the normal speed. The clients he acts for are the people who have offered on the chain-free property at the top of the chain. They have only just put in their offer about a week ago. Surely then they still need to go through the whole searches, mortgage, surveys, draft contracts, queries process themselves now? In talking to Betty, she agrees that they would be starting from scratch and would be much further behind where we are at the bottom, so she is unsure why they are pressing us and making everyone else nervous.
I understand that the fact our sale hasn’t completed yet will be something of concern, but we are nowhere near discussing exchange/completion dates for the onward chain, so what’s the rush and why is everyone in the chain feeling anxious about us taking our time? I was expecting to be in the new home around summer 2024, considering our first offer was accepted in December and this is a pretty long chain. Everyone further up the chain getting antsy is making me feel nervous because the property we’ve offered on is our dream home, and we’d be really, really gutted if the sellers panicked and decided to pull out and remarket if they think that will move things along quicker. All the blame at the moment seems to be pointed at our sale which IMO is not really relevant at this point. There still feels like lots more needs to happen in the chain itself before we will all be ready to exchange, but now I feel like I’ve been too nonchalant about the whole thing and it might well fall apart around us. Am I being unrealistic?