Timings with house purchase - advice needed

bennyblueblue

Hello,

We had an offer accepted today on a repo and we're really pleased. We have a mortgage offer in place but my partners father has some cash in the bank so offered to cover us so we can go in as cash buyers be seen as favourable in the EA's eyes. We imagined that as we have a mortgage in principle we could then set about getting the wheels in motion within the 28 days allowed with a repo to get the mortgage delivered. We have since taken a call from the EA saying that as we are cash the lender wants exchange within 14 working days from when the solicitor receives the instruction (Friday or Monday).

My question is, should we come clean and risk a price hike or complications or could we potentially pull this one off in the time frame. Will we have to have the mortgage funds in place within the 14 working days or can we just pay the deposit and then secure the funds before completion? The other option would be to arrange the mortgage after completion and pay partner's dad off then but apparently you have to wait 6 months for the land registry to do its thing and by that time we may not get the same decent mortgage offer.

Any advice appreciated.

whiskywhisky

Lets clear this up - you will NOT get the mortgage within 14 days, worse still you are highly highly unlikely to get it within 28 days.

Therefore your only option is to pay your partner's day afterwards, with the 6 months resgisty = this is something I have never heard off.

bennyblueblue

Thanks for the response, it is tight but so long as the mortgage offer is confirmed before exchange won't that be enough as we can pay the deposit no problem. Does anyone know what are the other aspects we need to be thinking of?

princessamy86

You can't physically exchange without proof of funds or a mortgage offer. If I was you, I would fess up to the estate agent, you'll have to anyway as the mortgage company will want to do a survey before they issue the mortgage offer. I don't really understand what you mean about the land registry "doing it's thing"? It's highly unlikely you will be able to exchange in the timescale they want unless you just borrow the money off partner's dad. Why did you not just tell them you were buying with a mortgage?? Were there loads of other buyers interested?

bennyblueblue

It was the first house we have seen in the area that fits the bill and we wanted to everything we could to secure it. It was slightly above budget but we negotiated into our range for cash - silly on reflection but father in law offered and it seemed like a good idea at the time and we didn't know about the 14 day exchange at this point. We've dug ourselves into a hole and now we are worried that the price will go up or they'll think we're messing them around if we come clean - oh what a wicked web we weave...

Land registry doing their thing ie, registering the property in our name.

alm721

It is unlikly however, we are just buying a new house and we had an offer accepted one Friday, I emailed my IFA over the weekend to let them know, they mailed back on the Monday to ask for details and card details to pay the valuation fee. I emailed back details same day. The survey was booked for and done on the Thursday, we recieved the survey report on the Saturaday and the mortgage offer of the Monday so it actually only took a week from having paid the valuation fee to having recieved the mortgage offer. You would only need the offer to be able to exhange so technically it is possible. However, I imagine we were just very very lucky to have it all done this quickly. We were ready to go within a week but had to wait another 2 weeks before being in the same position with our buyers despite having accepted thier offer 2 weeks before we had one accepted so there is a big difference and it is unusual to get to this point so quickly. I should also say that we were already with the mortgage company we just borrowed another 40k. We also have an excellent credit rating and were borrowing around 50% of the value of our new home so I'm sure all these things probably affected how quickly it was dealt with.
The mortgage company you use will also make a difference, if you're going with Abbey then forget it, they are dreadfully slow!