The all new buyers/sellers waiting room (continued) (continued) thread!

[MovingToPlan]

The previous thread is almost full! We've had lots of completions, exchanges, offers accepted, maddening conveyancing teams, strange requests, and worries to last a lifetime. Welcome welcome.

Catch up here: The all new buyers/sellers waiting room (continued) thread

My update is that everything seems to be lining up and we're looking at exchange next week. 🤞 Hoping to complete a few weeks after that.

Good luck to you, whatever stage you're at in the process.

@Riskingitall24 , sorry to hear about your hesitant buyer. What you describe sounds like a minor issue and easily clarified, as you have done. Is the EA pushing the buyer? My EA was very good at pushing back when my buyer / their solicitor came up with unreasonable minor queries. It is their job to drive the sale forwards. You're right about the toll it takes on one's mental health. To answer your question, I think in many cases it isn't worth it (not to mention the expense). People move for all sorts of reasons, but some reasons are stronger than others. If you have decided on a new life abroad, that's a really positive reason and I think you just have to keep your eyes on the prize. In my case I sold my house in order to move into (and renovate) my former family home, and I just had to keep focusing on getting to the end of an often painful and difficult process. I'm nearly there (house sold, renovation at the snagging stage), and hopefully it will be worth it once I have fully recovered my sanity...

Sorry me and another FTB question. Do you organise your buyers report survey once the searches come back, or can I do it now whilst we wait?

@MovingToPlan there is nothing worse than having to essentially to put your trust and rely on strangers. We had very similar issues but the bottom of the chain. I can't understand when you're buying a house why people are not actively checking their emails especially this close to the finish line. Best of luck and really hope exchange takes place for you tomorrow!

@Buyingahouse2024 I think this too. I'm constantly checking emails all the time.

I am getting weird stories daily from conveyancer and EA. I'm sure they think I'm a giant pain in the arse but ffs, were trying to move over 100 miles (with cats), arrange schools for 4 dc, one of which has an EHCP. This is beyond stressful. Everyone else in the chain is local and dgf apparently. Meanwhile our nerves are shredded.

If you mean survey, do it as soon as possible. Your mortgage company will instruct a surveyor but don't pay for upgraded survey's with them.

The reason for this is they may get spooked about the findings of the survey and decline an offer if you pay for their surveyor to do more than the valuation.

If you have your own surveyor then your mortgage company wont see anything on the report and you don't have to disclose it to them.

Morning all, sorry to hear about all the stresses for those waiting on exchanges and annoying buyers!
Top of chain on holiday so no movement. My solicitor has some more? Enquiries following our buyers’ survey 😩 but told me this last week and hasn’t forwarded them on (they were in the post pile). Am I being unreasonable to email her again a week on to ask her if she’s had chance to review them? I’m guessing not 😜 but maybe I can push her. It’s hard to find the line between being annoying and letting them do it all in their own time.
Grrrrrr….i just want a date and nobody above is ready to start talking exchange though apparently everyone is aiming for July (getting to the point where I don’t believe this 😔😔)

Thanks @fromtheshires the mortgage company done their valuation survey ages ago and all good. I believe we also need to do a survey to check for any potential arising issues?

You’re not being unreasonable to prompt your solicitor after a week & no obvious progress.

Agreed. God I'd be on their case more often than once a week. I'm so impatient and stressy with these things. I'd be worried that a letter had been missed / a message not passed on or something similar. I mean you're paying them a lot of money the least they can do is bloody get on with stuff and keep you up to date.

you're paying them a lot of money the least they can do is bloody get on with stuff and keep you up to date.

Are you in my brain?! This is what I've been ranting about to my partner for weeks now. The lack of clear communication between people whose job it is to communicate is mind boggling.

I've given verbal permission for the exchange yet again this morning. We shall see.

We exchanged on our sale and purchase last Thursday and are completing this Friday. Eeek! The house is just boxes and chaos right now but can't wait to finally get the keys for the new house in 2 days!

Good luck with it all!

We've not exchanged again. New reason, the last link in the chain is buying a new build and the builder won't exchange without a priority search result they are waiting from the land registry. Why is this only now coming to light? I am done in.

@MovingToPlan You're taking this way better than I would.

Id have been onto the phone to my estate agent demanding an update from everyone in the chain as to what is left outstanding from each person and a timeline for the outstanding actions being completed.

The stresses of house buying and selling really fuck with someone like me who wants to be in control and micromanage

@MovingToPlan JFC this is ridiculous! Like you say, how does that even just come to light!

I have rung my solicitor for an update 3 times today and no answer. Quite frankly it’s unacceptable! We are supposed to be exchanging this week!

Well, the new build top of chain buyers are on holiday next week. And we agreed to a completion the following Monday, 17th. But there's no way I'm agreeing to complete on that date if we don't exchange tomorrow. It'll be w/c 24th instead. And then we're at risk of our mortgage offer expiring, maybe even my buyer's offer expiring too. This is such a farce.

I'm having wine tonight.

Fuck it have the bottle! You have my permission.

With regard to mortgage extensions if it's only a month then you may be ok. It all depends what rate you secured as to if they will honour it or not.

I've just checked, we have until 12 July, so I'm going to sit back and let the feckers sort their shit out.

Hoping I'll be joining you all on the thread soon. Just had our EA in touch about the buyer who came back for a 2nd viewing last week. Apparently they've been away since then and they want to look at 1 other property on Friday as a comparison but they're expecting to make an offer on ours after that. Obviously they could 100% change their minds but it sounds encouraging, especially since they got in touch with the EA rather than the other way round.
We've found somewhere we like and it's chain free which is good so hopefully we'll be in a position to make an offer on that soon. One VERY good sign was that the EA selling out house has asked my permission to speak to the estate agent marketing the house we like. She wants to tell him she's expecting our house to be under offer soon based on the conversation she had today and she wants to ask him to ask his sellers to potentially hold off accepting any other offers till the weekend to give us a chance to put one in (hopefully). I was pretty impressed that she's being so helpful and thorough! Fingers crossed.

Just as I was about to email solicitor, I get an email. No info on whether my vendor has actually responded to enquiries from 3 weeks ago 🙄 but two new requests for jobs to be done from our buyers 🙄. Luckily they should only come to £400 so whilst I’d rather say no and just knock it off the price, I’m being nice and will get a builder in to do it as I just want things to move!!!
I’m so so tired of all this now. If we don’t exchange in July I’ll be so down.

So we are off to view lots of properties for our onward - but 3 of them were cancelled today! (1 SSTC, 1 vendor no longer wants to sell up, 1 vendor only wants 1 specific property that just went SSTC so do we still want to view in the hopes that the property the vendor wants comes back on the market 🙄). Means we are down to 5 now, and 3 are probably no go after looking on satellite views (smaller gardens than pics make it look). Worrying we won't find something - especially as we head into summer and it all slows down. AGH!

Also aware this is the very beginning of what is going to be an arduous process so really trying not to stress already.

We are signing something that requires witness, going to pay the deposit to my solicitor so that she could do the exchange for me.
She said "You are not bound by signing the Contract at this stage but it will simply mean that I will be holding a signed Contract on file in readiness for exchange."
So, am I actually exchanging contract now?
It's kind of confusing. lol

What were the jobs out of interest? Id be loathed to be doing jobs even if they are cheap because if they walk away you've essentially wasted money to 'fix' things that may not need fixing other than to keep a buyer happy.

"You are not bound by signing the Contract at this stage but it will simply mean that I will be holding a signed Contract on file in readiness for exchange."

It's pretty obvious from the solicitors email that you wont have exchanged and they want you to sign the forms ready for when you do.

@fromtheshires
Thanks.
When does the real exchange occur then? Do we need to sign anything for that??

Or the contract we just signed is ready for her to exchange?