Buyer’s solicitor being a nightmare

[Mog0224]

Am I being unreasonable here?
We sold our house 7 months ago. Things have been slow going but we are nearing the end with a long chain.
Our buyers had a survey done 6 weeks ago. The surveyor mentioned one problem to us but said that otherwise the house was in excellent condition for its age (over 120 years old)
We heard nothing for 3 weeks and assumed they must be happy with the survey. Then we got an e mail saying they weren’t happy with the issue mentioned by the surveyor (same one he said to us) and they wanted a structural engineer to come look and would we pay. We said yes we would do that. Waited 10 days for agreement and got a snarky comment saying essentially “why haven’t you already done this? Why aren’t you taking it seriously?” When we were waiting for their solicitor to confirm.
So we booked the structural engineer.
The day before the structural engineer was due we got an e mail with a whole load more demands, put as statements, not questions. To summarise they said that we, the seller would

1. Pay for the works quoted on top of the structural engineer, but he had to work on behalf of our buyers, not us.
2. Some vague thing about home insurance which had no real direction
3. Get our neighbours to sign a legally binding document to say they would pay for half the works for something unrelated that we had never previously discussed
4. We would agree to a reduction in price based upon other works as our buyer would only pay a maximum of £3,000. We would essentially pay anything over that (with no quotes and no actual list of what works they count in that)

My honest reaction is to tell them to do one. We should be ready to exchange and they have left this to the eleventh hour and keep changing the goal posts and demanding (very rudely) more from us. We sold at reasonable market value, not above or below, but now it’s below as prices have increased.
We were going to offer to pay them the estimate that our structural engineer gives us for the one big job the surveyor mentioned, but nothing more. Essentially we are going to pay for that, on the understanding that we are then ready to exchange and will not entertain any more negotiating or demands from them. If they don’t like it we will be pulling out because their solicitor has caused us no end of stress. At one point our solicitor refused to speak to him as he was being so rude and making ridiculous demands.
I should also mention that the “big job” is still only about £2,000 in total to fix, including permissions and structural engineer. About 0.7% of the house cost.
Any advice?

Update
so we gave them an ultimatum. These are our terms and we will not negotiate. Take them and agree to exchange, or we remarket.
we heard nothing on the first day. So the next day we said they have until close of business to respond. At 3 minutes before closing time they responded and accepted our terms.
I was all ready to start again and have viewings this weekend. But I am glad that weeks of uncertainty and stress are over!

Well done

Well done OP, some people are absolute piss-takers!
We were in a very long chain buying our current house and it was exceptionally stressful. Hope you get to échange and completion very soon.

*exchange

@Mog0224 Pleased you have some good news thank you for the update, have you now exchanged?

All we got was 2 lines saying “we agree to proceed with the given terms” essentially. So I have responded “so can you confirm that we are now ready to exchange as per our terms?”
Other good news, other sections of the chain are ready so we may be in in as little as 2-3 weeks!
Not doing this again for a LONG time

The trouble with house buying and selling is you have not a lot of control over what kind of astonishing piss-takers you have to deal with. So important to have good boundaries and the ability to say no to ridiculous requests- or demands, in fact! So glad you held your ground.
We are in the middle of moving today, into a rental so as not to lose our current buyer having been pissed around by our first buyer for nine months! God I'm so tired. And now we have to move twice, into rental and then (fingers crossed) into the house we're hoping to buy.
There should be tighter guidelines on how people behave in sales because honestly it's like the wild west sometimes. 😂
Good luck with your ongoing move @Mog0224

Oh God! That sounds awful!
they did ask us at one point if we would move into rental to speed things up and we said absolutely not. Then they became the ones holding it up!
Sorry to hear you are going through so much. Hopefully in a year you’ll be looking back and thinking it was worth it. 🫣

Fingers crossed the whole chain exchanges very soon and all is well.

This is exactly where we are going to end up. The whole process is ridiculous!

I think you end up relenting and bending over backwards to try and make things smooth and stop chains breaking.

In hindsight I wish 7 months ago when our buyer started being ridiculous we just said 'no. Take it or leave it' and relisted. The whole process is absolutely ridiculous!

Good luck!

The last house we sold had some asshole buyers. So we negotiated a price we were happy with, all fine. Then there was the evaluation which came it at 50 grand under their negotiated offer, £125.000 under asking price. It was a small location we lived in and we discovered that this surveyor was infamous for under valuing houses, and we think the buyers knew him as well, so they offered the new price, the price they wanted all along we suspected.

We agonised over it and nearly relented, we were moving back to the uk from a British island, best to just get it sold, then we thought no, screw them and said we wanted the original agreed amount. They came back with a slightly higher offer than the surveyor recommendation, it’s all they could apparently afford. We flat out said no, put it back on the market. They came back again with a still low offer, we said no again, we want it back on the market. Suddenly they ‘found’ the extra money out of nowhere and paid our original agreed price.

I know it sounds like they were legit, but it was a small island and we knew they were trying to screw us over from others telling us. Our estate agent actually said after that they were really proud that we stuck to our guns, they all knew they were taking the piss as well.

Im proud of you OP, and anyone out there facing similar, remember, don’t loose your nerve, most of the time these people are trying it on. A survey will always bring up things, sometimes fairly big repairs, but that is the new owners problem, don’t fix anything, don’t give an inch, because they will come back. Simply say it’s a sold as seen transaction, if you don’t want it, back on the market it goes, most will relent, but if they don’t then off you go again. I would never ever pander to a buyer, give an inch and they’ll take a mile!