How hard can it be to exchange bloody contracts!!??

[ErlingHaalandsManBun]

Just that really.

Selling my own property, (which is another disastrous mess of frustration and a different story altogether) but have also been selling my parents property. The sale has bobbed along okay, not many enquiries and a keen buyer who already had a mortgage offer in place.

Towards the end of the sale our buyers solicitor left her role and her files/cases passed on to a different solicitor who has been SLOW! Took her 4 weeks to even look at our sale and confirmed she needed to review the file but on first look everything seemed in order.

She finally reviewed the file 2 weeks later and she confirmed last week that everything was in order and we were ready to exchange and complete. Buyer transferred the deposit for the sale. Our solicitor put forward an exchange date for today. Buyer solicitor has ghosted all emails and calls all week. Finally our Estate Agent got hold of her this morning and she said she will look at it next week!!!

Look at what???? We are all bloody ready, just exchange contracts already!!!!

Anyone else going through this shit show of a process and waiting for exchange of contracts to happen?

Why is it so bloody hard to get contracts exchanged?

Rant over (I think!)

Agree it is an absolutely hateful experience.☹️

We were told that we were going to exchange "tomorrow" but on the actual day, the EA dropped into the conversation that our (chain free cash buyer) had not yet sold their property (WTAF!).😲
Took another 6-weeks with conversations happening daily. We kept saying we wanted to pull out and remarket but our EA strung us along with false promises.

Turns out our EA and our solicitor were actually in a relationship and feeding us half and/or untruths.
Never before have I wished so much that karma was a thing and they would also be treated the same way by someone.🤬

Sold a probate property a few months later and both the (different) EA & solicitor restored our faith the some people actually know how to do their jobs and work for the good of the customer.

@Nourishinghandcream oh my god what? They hadn't even sold!!?? WTF? So basically you were being strung along. Hideous!.

We have been ready to exchange since the middle of August and have had to wait, and wait, and wait for our buyers solicitor to review the file. Its just so frustrating to be told its still not happened.

We feel we are being strung along by the buyers solicitors. Our EA says that our buyers are as frustrated as we are and are also calling them daily for updates. If I were the buyers I would be going into the office and refusing to leave until I had spoken with someone about why this hideous hold up has happened again. But that's me. I'm a stubborn cow 😅

The whole buying and selling process is atrocious.

Who benefits from this out-dated system? Certainly not the vendor or buyer

My ds is has it all online so you can see where the hold ups are.

We were told by the EA that the people who wanted to buy our house were cash buyers, were exchanging contracts on their property the next week and completing the following week and would stay with relatives until the sale completed.

Twelve weeks later, we discovered that they hadn’t actually sold their house, that there was a problem with an extension and that they needed a mortgage, which they couldn’t get. We wasted practically the whole of the summer on them.

@Bluevelvetsofa hideous! What an absolutely ridiculous waste of time. You must have been fuming! Has your sale gone through now?

How is the process the problem ?

It's the people executing the process.

We relisted with a new EA at the beginning of August and had an offer two days later, for more than the original sale. We moved mid November, but had to spend the night of completion in a Premier Inn, because the purchase didn’t complete until 5.15 and the movers couldn’t unload in the dark. We had to pay extra for them to come back and I unload the following day.

In this case yes.

In the case of my other house sale its the process.

The buying and selling process in England needs an overhaul IMO tying people into a sale much earlier than exchange of contracts. Also the whole process takes so long these days and it never used to take anywhere near as long as this.

Basically all the time is taken either on :

a) Waiting for solicitors to do their job.

c) Waiting for information, either from searches, surveying, the owners themselves.

The reason the process takes longer these days is there are more checks to do. For example building control and certificates never really used to be an issue.

If you tie buyers into making a commitment before they have all information in order to make a purchase then you are disadvantaging them in case something crops up later in the process that stops them wanting to buy the place (this place is full of threads where sellers have covered up problems until late in the process in the hope they can force the sales process through).

If you want your buyer to pay a "commitment deposit" in advance of finding all the information on the property there is nothing to stop a seller forcing this. However whether you would get a buyer willing to pay it would be another issue, as again unscrupulous sellers could hide problems until after the deposit is paid only to have them revealed at a later stage.

Once you start imposing conditions like this you will either favour the buyer or the seller in some way. It is inevitable.