Exchange and complete on the same day?

It is possilbe but it is a lot easier to leave a gap inbetween.

We completed last wednesday and complete this wednesday this is mainly becuase your mortgage lender needs 5 working days to transfer the money and so doing them both on the same day could be tricky, especially if anything goes wrong.

Not only this but you will have to transfer your full deposit to the solicitor rather than 10% on exchange and the remainder on completion. As well as this many solicitors require payment of their fees before completion, if you do exchange and complete on the same day, but the solicitor has more work to do you may find yourselves getting another invoice later on down the line.

You could have the problem of getting removals sorted and finding out that it has fallen through, as there have been many stories like this on the forums recently, so you would be stuck with everything packed and left with a removal fee.

The point about exchanging and completing on the same day has come up before.

A solicitor will only exchange when:

1. All searches in and all questions answered by other solicitors to his satisfaction.
2. There is a satisfactory mortgage offer and conditions related to it have been satisfied.
3. You have signed contract and provided 10% deposit.
4. A date for completion has been agreed.

Depending on the lender it will take a week or more to get the advance funds from the lender. Normally therefore there is a delay of about a week between exchange and completion. You can't exchange any earlier because all the pieces of the jigsaw need to be in place to exchange.

What sometimes happens is that some minor issue has not been dealt with, which is not expected to be a problem, but just might be. Everybody in a chain wants to move on a particualr date but this last point is holding up exchange. It could be something like repeating a local search because that int he HIP is out of date. So the solicitors agree amongst themselves to work towards a particular completion date and they order the money from their respective lenders for thta date. Then when the last piece of the jigsaw falls into place (e.g. the search) they exchange. This could be 2 days before completion, the day before, or even the day of completion.

The essential point to understand here is that it doesn't necessarily speed things up in terms of completing, and is not something that is normally planned. Also if removals etc are concerned the removal men will want a firmed up booking a week or so before completion so completing in a shorter time frame sometimes carries a risk of having to pay the removal men a cancellation fee if the move doesn't happen, because exchange doesn't happen because unexpectedly the search or whatever comes back with some adverse result.

If you only have a week between exchange and completion you will end up paying mortgage and rent at the same time - can you afford that? Notice on your rental property is usually one month from the date you normally pay rent, so it could easily be almost two months from the date of exchange if you have only paid rent a day or two before.

Firstly, no the HIP won't provide the info for the searches - your solicitor will be checking all these things independently on your behalf. Secondly, the seller having had a lot of the legal work already done won't neccesarily help you - most of the legal work to be done is from the buyer's side. It means if there are any certificates or written proof of things that they need to supply, they should have them to hand, but your solicitor will still have to go through the process of requesting the information from the seller's solicitor first.

The best way to keep things moving as fast as possible are, firstly, to make sure you tell your solicitor that you are keen to have a fast purchase and secondly to just keep in touch giving him regular calls to see how things are going. But if there are any snags that slow things down, do remember that the legal process is what protects you. Depending on how the process goes, it can be very stressful getting to exchange and it's actually quite nice to have that time before exchange and completion where you know the hard work is done and you can just take a breath and calmly prepare for the actual move.