Any tips for getting a flat sale through endless enquiries?

[Gokwan99]

Been stuck in enquiries loop of hell for last 5 months trying to sell my flat. Every time we think we’ve received the last lot of enquiries, there’s silence followed by more drip fed enquiries, often repeating previous ones. Problem is I’m 8 months pregnant and the housing association has 20 working days to reply each time, so we’re really running out of time.
my mortgage broker has said not to give any ultimatums, but no one seems to understand the time pressure and the fact that I’m not going to risk bursting my c section stitches!
Any tips for getting this over the line? I feel like this could easily go on for another few months well past the point my mortgage offer expires otherwise. It doesn’t help that there’s no EA in a traditional sense so no one chivvying the buyer on. Their conveyancer seems to be buying time.
Thanks!

To give context, we’re now on our 75th enquiry 🫠

Is this a shared ownership property? They are notoriously difficult to resell.

Yup🙃 the buyer’s conveyancers are on the Housing association’s approved list and quite a few flats have sold in the building recently so it’s all bloody annoying!

What do you mean you're on your 75th enquiry? Is that questions you are asking them or questions they are asking you?

They’re asking me. All my enquiries for my onward purchase were resolved months ago (~30 of them)

Are you saying that on 75 separate occasions they have queried something that you've had to go back and find out? 75?

There have been 75 enquiries, mostly sent 2 or 3 at a time.

OK. I'd give it one last chance. I'd email them/their solicitor and say that they've sent 75 requests over which have been horribly time consuming for you to deal with. Ask them to send over one final email detailing requests and you will deal with that but going forward you won't be responding to their demand for enquiries.

And then I'd pull out. Sorry to say but I would.

Nightmare, i sold a flat privately earlier this year, and we still fielded a huge numbers of enquiries that the management company had to respond to and were also very slow (& charged us extra as sellers for their time responding to some). I’d imagine shared ownership even worse. Sale took nearly six months even though we were chain free. The only thing that sped up the buyer or stopped the questions was when they realised their own mortgage offer was to expire and suddenly they wanted to exchange. Some of it is conveyancy, but also many FTB are so risk averse and seem to think the seller needs to compensate them for future risk, doesn’t help. Good luck!

I agree with advice to give them one final round of questions or the flat is going back on the market. Some folk can never be satisfied and will continue to drag it on and never exchange

Thank you, sorry you had to deal with this too! I can totally see how their MO expiring would light a fire up their bums. Unfortunately pretty sure ours expires before theirs

I'd do this too ^

We had similar when selling our last property, a two bed detached converted mill in rural Wales. Our buyers (not FTB but fairly young/inexperienced)/their conveyancing solicitor put forward 55+ enquiries.

We gave them an ultimatum to exhange immediately and complete a week later or we'd re-market. It worked...kind of, as it over ran by a couple of days.

That number of enquiries is frankly ridiculous, particularly if some have previously been dealt with. You need to make a stand @Gokwan99!

Have you seen the solicitors correspondence?

It took me eight months to sell an empty flat, not housing association.

In the end, I had to threaten to pull out, and my solicitor started responding to the stupid questions with "asked and answered" to the repeat ones - this is efficient and also reassuring because they realise that their own list of request is repeating themselves

then he found a diplomatic way to say "my client will not or cannot be answering that" - but that was for really dumb questions like "do we have copies of planning permission for this building from 25 years ago?"

The builder is probably closed down and the council won't keep records from 25 years ago! Mad.

something really needs to be done about conveyancing. It's so slow it's going back backwards.

You could tell them you will progress their sale but it is going back on the market until exchange given how long it has taken so far.

Depending on what the enquiries are, just stop answering and say you’ll get an indemnity to cover it. Are they completely new questions or follow ups?

We had this and everytime it went back to the buyer's conveyancer a new person would take over and ask the same things. The freeholder and management company took ages to answer stuff too.

We got it through in the end but it took many, many months. You need to have a really very good solicitor yourselves and get the buyer involved to chase at their end.

@Chatsbots "We had this and everytime it went back to the buyer's conveyancer a new person would take over and ask the same things"

across the working world generally, the concept of keeping a file on something and keeping up-to-date seems to have disappeared. I honestly don't know how the country is still working at this point. Well, it practically isn't.