Chain complete conveyancing support thread

[BakedPotatoBeansCheeseColeslaw]

My chain completed on Monday. I’ve booked my survey, instructed my solicitor and applied for my mortgage. Now begins the anxious wait to see if we will actually get to complete.

My friend once likened moving house to the first trimester - don’t talk about it to many people until you’re sure it’s happening.

Anyone else in the same boat? We are hoping for an August completion as chain short, and onward chain was already a way through the process before falling through and us joining 🙏🏻🙏🏻

It is exciting! Hoping to exchange this week and complete next week, but just trying to agree a completion date with the whole chain which is proving a challenge as some want early in the week while others want later!

So of course we didn’t exchange last week 🙄 All good to go on our sale but there was one outstanding query on our purchase. Literally chased our solicitor three times yesterday and finally got an email from another solicitor saying ours is out of the office and she would check and get back to us!!!! Can another solicitor do the exchange if ours is away??? As long as all the paperwork is done as really want to be in before back to school in 3 weeks!

@Namechange13101 Im sure another solicitor can stand in if yours isn’t available. Our solicitor was tearing his hair out at the solicitor acting for our vendors two weeks ago, then she went on holiday last week and everything was rushed through. Good luck!

after being under offer since December, it’s starting to look as though we really might move this Friday. We’ve had to concede on everything I said I wanted in terms of moving times/dates etc but our buyers have backed us into a corner. We reluctantly agreed to exchange and complete this Friday which Im not happy about but our buyers have agreed to pay our removal fees if they cause any kind of delay that stops us being able to move into our new house. It’s a huge move for us - we’ve been in our house for 35 years and we aren’t downsizing - and the removal people are due to arrive in about an hour to start packing 😬. Our sale has taken 8 months so far, and this time last month we hadnt even seen our new house. 😆😆

@Namechange13101 how frustrating! Very little movement here either - seller’s solicitor responded to all outstanding enquiries apart from one (why?!) and the buyer isn’t engaging with the estate agent about potential dates to move which is a bit worrying!

@Growlybear83 you must be emotionally exhausted after all these months. 35 years is incredible. This will be our 7th house we have bought in 27 years!

We are no further on either….we have all agreed to work towards a completion date this Friday (!) however buyers solicitor has not yet received the mortgage deed and won’t exchange until they have it. Being very obstructive when asked to provide tracking number. Now our sellers solicitor has come back and said if we don’t exchange by tomorrow morning then Friday is off!!

I can’t understand why buyers solicitor is being so obstructive, it’s like she’s purposely trying to withhold information to make things more difficult for us. She ghosted my solicitor for a full week, I had to get the estate agent to call her.

We have booked removals, packers due to come in on Thursday and pack the house up, dogs due to go to the kennels tomorrow. It is hell on earth

@Nomorenamechangestoday the solicitors are the absolute worst - my seller’s solicitor ghosted mine for about a fortnight. In the end the seller has to go down there in person.

@Growlybear83 how are you feeling about moving? The house I’m buying has been occupied by the same people since 1992 - proper family house for them and it does make me nervous they might pull out but I need to remember my parents left our family
home a few years ago because they were ready for a change and they’ve never looked back really

Its all so frustrating isn't it! Fingers crossed for you @Nomorenamechangestoday that you get the docs needed to keep to this week!

I'm so emotionally exhausted by the whole process. Ironically our sellers are desperate to move and been chasing hard since we had a comeplte chain back in May and it is this one query that is holdiing the whole process up. I can't work out from the notes our solicitor has sent over if its their solicitor being deliberately difficult or ours asking repeatedly for something that we already have! I know we got sent the same query about 4 times by our buyers which was really annoying so think its just the way some queries have to be answered but i'm really hoping we can get an answer today so we can proceed to exchange!

@Namechange13101 mine is definitely constantly asking the same flipping questions - I thought they were meant to work for me, not be sabotaging my move with nonsense

That's exactly it! They should work for us. Sometimes i feel like they don't want to earn their money!

@BakedPotatoBeansCheeseColeslaw. Im feeling a bit scared about the move - Ive been in this house for over half of my life and it feels very strange to be going, although ive wanted to move for a long time. There are so many memories hwre, but we’re moving to the sort of house I never imagined we could live in so Im also very excited. The packing is daunting but the movers started today and they’re wonderful.

Ive not been impressed with our estate agent but the solicitor is absolutely fantastic. I don’t remember a day when I didn’t speak to him on the phone and he has done everything he’s needed to do instantly throughout the whole process. He’s been such a huge support during all the problems and he is gone above and beyond what we could ever have expected. It hurts a bit to think that we will be paying the estate agent several times more than the solicitor’s fee when it should be the other way round.

@Sadteacher I think at the moment everything is so manic thar Ive not had time to think, let alone being emotionally exhausted! But I expect it will hit me when we leave for the last time.

@Growlybear83 It'll all be worth it once you're moved and setlled in.

In a plot twist of our move, we've got the last piece of paperwork sorted for the last enquiry so should all be good to go! Hooray you'd think, but in the email confmring the enquries are complete was by our solicitors saying that a completion of first week of September has been confirmed when we were all working towards end of next week! Our solicitor is on annual leave so this has been conveyed to us by someone covering her cases else via a "note" and when i spoke to our EA they hadn't heard this either! So now have to wait for the firm to speak to our buyers and sellers solicitors to find out where this new date has come from!!! Honestly so over this whole process now😡

That’s SO frustrating for you! We’ve been very irritated by the timescale our buyers imposed on us. The buyers pulled out at the bottom of the chain in April, and it was sold again in June. We assumed we had a reasonable amount of time to find our onward house but the day we had our offer accepted on the new house (16 July) our agent told us that our buyers’ mortgage was expiring on 15 August and because they’d already had it extended, they would have to get a new mortgage if we couldn’t meet their deadline. Everyone involved in the purchase has been amazing despite a major problem with the Land Registry and we were ready to exchange last Friday. Then the buyers insisted on the simultaneous exchange and completion, which has filled me with horror. We felt we didn’t have any choice but to agree and Im sitting here surrounded by packing boxes 😬😬

I have had news that we are ready to exchange from our end - for some reason our buyer’s AML checks seem to be taking weeks so there had better not be a problem 😩 that’s the last piece of the puzzle I believe 🙏🙏

@BakedPotatoBeansCheeseColeslaw thats so frustrating!!! Surely the AML checks should have been the first things done in the process? Ours were done as soon as we had our offer accepted! Maybe it’s something to do with a gift for the deposit of something? Fingers crossed it all gets sorted soon for you!

im anxiously waiting for 9am to come around so I can call the solicitors for an update on dates!!!

Ours too! Granted ours were extremely straightforward - all the money is from
the sale of this house - but it shouldn’t be taking this long. Even when we were FTB and my dad had given me £30k and we had to go down a rabbit hole proving where the money had come from because he said “I don’t know it could have even my pension lump sum, my redundancy pay out or from selling my house” 🤣 it didn’t take this long!

She is French so I’m wondering if there are some international transactions holding things up but like, just get on with it! I’m pregnant and impatient!

If your buyer doesn’t want to complete until September then using the AML checks could just be an excuse to basically give you an “it’s out of our hands” answer and buy them a few more weeks.

Maybe! I don’t mind a September completion though I just want to know what dates we are working towards so I can make some plans!

At what point do you all agree dates? We’re a chain of 4 (FTB, us, them, new build). We all seem to be thinking 4th September however nobody is officially saying it via solicitors and we really need to know now due to moving schools etc. Apparently only waiting on a few enquiry responses.

How is this being communicated? Via estate agent or do you have each other’s details

My FTB buyer seems confused about the whole thing. I was notified yesterday that her AML checks (if they are real) are the last piece of the puzzle as everyone else in the chain is ready to go. We’ve been asking her for dates and she doesn’t seem to think she gets to choose one (within reason) and that it is subject to change!

The estate agents are saying 4th looks likely and that buyer/seller are happy with this, solicitors seem to be ignoring the question when asked via my solicitor

All the back and forth is so annoying isn’t it. Would be so much easier to speak to people directly! I had half a mind to go round to the sellers and speak to them - apart from they are no longer the problem - it’s like, I know where you live 🤣

Last update for us was 3rd September looks to be the date as long as we exchange ASAP, chased our solicitors and agents for an update from our buyers so we can just get on with it as apparentyl the rest of the is ready to go and its just them that we need to start off the exchange!

We are in Scotland so allegedly easier but our buyers(FIL executory sale so empty) are still asking stupid questions that should have been asked weeks ago. We are due to complete tomorrow and they have apparently transferred money to their solicitors but missives still have to conclude! Honestly it's crazy. We accepted their offer 2 months ago.

Well we were due to exchange today and complete tomorrow but our buyers useless solicitor dropped at the last minute yesterday she won’t be able to release the contract until Monday morning! Too late to postpone removals so we’ve gone ahead with the packers in today, removals tomorrow and everything going into storage over the weekend while we stay with family then simultaneously exchange and complete on Monday! Not the way I wanted things to pan out at all but if we are in on Monday it will be worth it.

It’ll be a nail biting weekend!