House buying hardball - any tips?

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We're meant to be moving house a week today. Missives still to be concluded as our buyer's lenders have just realised the home report needs to be updated, which it will be on Friday. Our solicitor told us today that our sellers want three weeks between concluding missives and entry date, as they have still to empty the house (probate) and don't want to till missives concluded, just in case. Wh could they not have told us earlier? Any suggestions welcome.

If your missives aren't yet concluded I don't think there's much you can do. Take advice from your solicitor and see what they advise and if there's anything you can do to speed things along.

Something similar happened to us, although different kind of situation - the sellers bank refused to release the property as they weren't convinced the sellers would be able to settle debts attached to the property. We were assured by solicitor it would take 2-3weeks to sort out. We put our stuff into storage. We never got that house, 4 months later we ended up buying something else.

Do you know if the estate has gone for confirmation (probate) yet? The commissary court is apparently backed up too (or at least, it was).

The sale of MIL's house has been significantly delayed for months now not all to do with the commissary courts, some of it to do with family politics, some to do with the executor and some to do with changes of personnel at the solicitors, to whom the executor sold his legal practice but it can't be sold until confirmation has happened . Fortunately the buyer is buying it as a do-er upper investment so has been happy(ish) to wait - especially as the market has increased significantly in the nearly a year () since he made the offer and it was accepted! Initial date of entry was September last year

we got confirmation of estate in 4 weeks (rather than the 2-3 weeks expected) so unlikely to be that I would have thought?

we are in your sellers position and while I wouldn't be asking for three weeks we would struggle with such a short turnaround from conclusion to sale because the stuff in the house isn't going to a single place, and lots of it will be given to local charities - most of whom don't operate over a weekend.

TBH though, my impression is that it's still a sellers market so think you need to be guided by your solicitor, see if you can find a middle ground?

Pretty sure the estate is confirmed. I understand they need to empty the house, but waiting till one week before the entry date we agreed to mention it is crazy. Do they think we would wait till now to book time off work and removals? And what about the people expecting to move into our flat next week? We're thinking we'll at least ask them to cover the costs incurred by the rest of the chain. We will have to pay an extra cost to the removal firm. Our buyers are likely to have extra costs as well.

I think the issue is possibly that if they haven't sold recently they'll have been unaware that they could end up in this position. Having missives concluded and moving within a few days was never the norm in Scotland - we once moved in four weeks from offer date and still had missives concluded ten days before.

I agree that it's really unfair for it only to be raised at this point (should have been at least two weeks ago!) but depending on where you are buying if you don't have concluded missives then you need to consider whether they could remarket for more money - that's the issue with "hardball". It's not what we would do but we're not in one of the out-of-control areas...