Have you made contact with your vendor's solicitor? If the whole conveyancing has ground to a halt?

[faraday]

We know who our vendor's solicitor is as it's in the 'agreement to buy' thing the EA sent us.

Now obviously we have our own solicitor but I was wondering whether anyone has ever called their vendor's solicitor to put a rocket up them if one's own solicitor is useless?

Like if OUR solicitor claims THEIR solicitor is dragging the chain CAN we call their solicitor up to ask what the problem is??

Anyone done this?

I believe there's someone here on MN mentions that they and the vendors themselves getting together and firing off a nasty letter jointly to both solicitors telling them to GET ON WITH IT as both solicitors were blaming each other for the delays!

DH did this when we were stuck in a horrendous chain many years ago in the middle of a property boom. By tracing the entire chain (which was longer than the all parties realised) he discovered that one of the solicitors - who was acting for two of the parts of the chain - was unable to cope with the work (they were subsequently struck off by the Law Society). Of course, the solicitor for other parties may not wish to speak to you, for professional reasons, but it might help you if that solicitor got the message that the lack of progress is due to your solicitor and not to you.

Well our buyer did something about his solicitor. He had an online, out of town solicitor, cheap but inefficient, we had a local person.

The irony was that he was more in hurry to move than us as somebody was buying his house and we were going into rental. I think he told his woes to the estate agent, who passed it on to us. Our solicitor was a non-nonsense woman we used before and she managed to bring about the exchange after weeks of faff. We ended up with a faster completion than we wished for but the chain held.

The vendor's solicitor will need to get permission from his client (the vendor) to speak to you. So you might as well talk to the vendor. And the estate agent should be able to cut to the chase.

tbh - if your solicitor is useless, get another one.

Faraday - that was me.

Dh wrote (well emailed) to our buyer's solicitor on behalf of the 4 of us. He got the buyers to email first to say that we were going to be writing on their behalf.

Worked a treat too. Their solicitor was newly qualified and very very slow, as she had to keep checking things with her supervisor.