Enquiries - how on earth do you answer them

[iloveyoubutilovememore]

So we’ve had our enquiries back from our buyers solicitor. So many of them and half of them we have no idea what to write. I’ve since emailed my solicitor for help with this, but some of them are asking for certificates that we either don’t have or have put somewhere very very safe. I’m guessing this is why the stage we’re at can take weeks or even months?!

Also out of curiosity, what is the next stage after this?

Some of the queries your solicitors will only know the answer to. You scan all the paperwork over to your solicitors and they will sort through it and see if it answers any questions. You then answer the rest of the questions to the best of your knowledge, some answers may be “unsure” or “not to our knowledge”. For some certificates/documents you might end up getting an indemnity insurance for them. The buyers might ask you to survey for certificates that are missing and your solicitors will let you know if this is a legal requirement.

Your solicitors will prepare a pack of answers and documentation to go back to your buyer’s solicitors. They will read through it and may have more questions. This process does take quite long time. How long depends on the efficiency of your solicitors and your buyers and the nature of the property. A Victorian terrace next to a river, with a loft conversion and a cellar is going to have more queries than a new build with the guarantee still in place.

Once everyone in the chain has satisfied queries, got any indemnities in place, surveys done then you can start to talk about exchange dates but it took us probably 8 months from starting queries to getting to discussing exchange.

@WhereIsMyLight thank you so much for the detailed response. We’ve never sold before so it’s relatively new to me. We are in a chain of four and luckily I am talking on messages to our seller who is v Co-operative. Our buyers seem keen to progress so again this could be helpful. Not so sure about the solicitors though!

With the certificates, it's worth really trying to find them because if you can answer with "yes, I have the certificate, here it is", that closes that enquiry and everyone moves on. If you say "can't find it" or "don't know" then there becomes the whole process of finding an alternative solution, or it starts to snowball into a potential dealbreaker for the buyers. You see the posts on here where people haven't got building regs for something or have a drive with no permission or a dropped kerb... I think I remember seeing someone here where there weren't Fensa certificates for 20 year old windows and they were getting in a right stress about it.

Generally if you don't have a certificate your options are to either
(a) go and get that certificate replaced (if it's just lost) - things like Fensa are kept on record and you can just buy a new copy if it was properly registered.
(b) apply for retrospective permission - sometimes this is simple and easy (I've had same day email exchange sort conservation area consent), and sometimes it's impossible or just really expensive - this is the one most likely to take months
(c) indemnity policy is where you generally end up if neither a or b are appropriate. Basically an insurance policy against anyone kicking up a stink about an issue, usually an easy answer but annoying because it adds a few hundred quid to your solicitor bills

If you don’t know the answer to something or don’t have a certificate being asked for you just have to state that on the form.

It’s then up to the buyer & their solicitor how they respond. It’s common not to have all the answers or all the certificates.

It's definitely worth looking for any guarantees and service records for fixtures and fittings etc. It will reduce the chance of more enquiries later and reduce delays.

Sorry one last question, can anyone shed some light on ‘breaches of covenants’???

Why are you dealing with this?? It's your solicitors job!!

@Blueuggboots she sent the enquiries and asked us to fill in the answers. I haven’t done this before so thought it was the norm :/

Are there any covenants on the deeds? Have you contravened them(put fence across front, parked a caravan on drive, run a business from home or similar)

@LIZS no not as far as I’m aware.

Your solicitor should be able to look at the deeds of the house and see if you’ve breached any covenants, they might just need to ask you about improvements you’ve made to clarify if you’ve breached them.

The house we bought had potentially breached covenants by converting a garage. So the mortgage company wouldn’t give us a mortgage without an indemnity that basically insures us if the council came around and tried to enforce the breach of covenants. It was £135 and our seller wouldn’t pay for it, so we got it. I don’t know if you’re not meant to do that as a buyer but it was just at the point of “if £135 is going to get this over the line, then so be it”. Basically I just think it’s a pointless money making exercise by the industry but there isn’t much you can do and only so many fights you can have throughout the process.

If you've still got the paperwork from when you bought some of the answers might be there!

Often covenants are unenforceable anyway, For example if a developer is the other party, the covenants are used in order to keep the uniformity of the development while properties are built and to conform to the planning permissions, but the developer subsequently goes bust.

Some of it is the solicitors job, but most of it is down to you as the Sellers! Your solicitor doesn't know who supplies your electricity or water or where the certificate for your double glazed windows are!

Nope. The solicitor can guide you but it is the sellers that have to answer. The solicitor will have no way of responding to many of the enquiries.

Aren't enquiries mostly standard?

Would it be unreasonable to expect sellers to prepare answers to enquiries as soon as the house goes on the market?

If you're asked about breaches of covenant, so long as it's the case, just say that you have not received written notice of a breach.

For all the enqs, it's much better to answer them as far as you can esp if it's paperwork and you can probably find it if you dig around. Don't answer it with something which can then be questioned easily - deal with it in one go. As an example, don't say that you think you have a copy but need to ask X as you'll get another enquiry asking you to do that - do it all in one hit so far as you can.

Yes exactly.

It does feel like they are asking 5,000 questions! I tackled it myself recently - struggled with uploading documents and just put “will forward later” and sent them via email a couple of days later.

Answering the questions took up most of one evening and all the ID stuff I did the following evening 😅

Agree with above comments about finding as much info/certificates as possible. Don't do it bit by bit thats what drags out the process!!!