Property Buying timline guesses....

[chillipopcorn1]

I know I know, how long is a piece of string etc. but I'm interested in people's views and experiences! We are selling a vacant property (we are not purchasing anything). Our buyer is selling her house to second home buyers who are buying with cash. She will be buying our house with the proceeds of her sale (no mortgage). When we brought our home it was a really simple purchase in terms of deeds etc. It's a bog standard Victorian terrace with a teeny garden. We accepted the offer on our house just under two weeks ago. Memorandum of Sale has been done (exchanged? not sure of the right verb!) and we have completed the documents required by our lawyer eg. ID verification, TA10 etc.

How long would you expect this sale to take? A teeny part of me is hoping and praying to have exchanged by Christmas - is that totally pie in the sky?!

I sold my late parents home earlier this year - no upward chain as we were just selling. We sold to a first time buyer who already had a mortgage offer in place. Very straightforward sale, no issues, no queries from searches and our buyers didn't even have a survey, so as straightforward as they come. But due to slow solicitors our sale still took almost 3 months to complete. Our Estate Agent said this should have completed in 2 months but the solicitors somehow dragged it out for an extra month.

Much of it will depend on how good the solicitors are during this process and how quickly everyone else in the chain responds to queries etc.

I would think it highly unlikely this will be done by Christmas but this is just my own experience and opinion.

I think even straightforward purchases take about three months these days. Maybe a couple of months if everyone is on the ball.

If you sold your house at the beginning of November I'm guessing there will be little chance of it selling by Christmas. I sold my empty house at the end of September and we are hoping to sell by Christmas, but won't be surprised if it is January. Nothing much will be done over the Christmas period either. Hopefully the searches won't take too long and enquiries will be straightforward. Good luck!

I bought from a seller in your position and it took 14 weeks but I wasn't in a chain, that was just the base time for a cash in hand cash buyer to buy a vacant house. Most of that time was verifying and fraud checking the cash and waiting on searches (which took forever).

Your issue is it takes as long as the other houses take to sell which is impossible to know really, it could collapse, their could be mortgage delays down the chain, someone might have survey issues etc...

Thanks - there’s no other mortgages to sort as only one house in chain which is to a cash buyer, and our buyer is mortgage free. Hopefully this will make it speedier but appreciate there can always be something!

The common sense I needed to hear! Thank you

When I moved recently the local searches took 15 weeks to come back so everyone was waiting on them for exchange.

We accepted an offer on our old house on the 8th August 2024, had our offer accepted on our new house on the 12th.

Exchanged on the 6th January 2025 and completed on the 9th January 2025. 5 months all in. Didn’t help the sellers were complicated….

We sold our last house in mid 2024 -

our buyers had already completed on their sale and were buying ours with cash. We were also cash buyers, buying an empty house where probate had been granted. Our buyers had a survey, but we had no survey or searches.

The process took 16 weeks from when we accepted our buyers offer to completion on sale/purchase.

It was our sale that held things up as there were a few issues with our septic tank. Our purchase was actually ready to exchange in 8 weeks.

A few years previously we accepted an offer from cash buyers on 10th Oct, had our own cash offer accepted on an empty house (vendors already bought elsewhere) and completed on 30th November. Neither us nor our buyers had a survey.

Check the searches turnaround times for the councils involved. Some of them take one working day on average, others take 40! Then there might be queries raised as a result.

www.searchflow.co.uk/news-and-events/personal-searches-turnaround-times/

Earlier this year I had a similar chain and it took us 4 months. However one person in the chain was pretty slow at starting the legal responses as a seller at the beginning and one set of solicitors was ridiculously slow to clear queries off the list.