Cosy: Agents and Solicitors

dfarry

Hi all...

The sale of my house continues a pace... the survey is on Friday and the buyers solitors are apparently knocking down the door so that they can get cracking on the legal work....

But.... we still haven't found a property yet and I wasn't going to instruct my own solicitors until I did..... the question though is is this reasonable?

My estate agent, is quite keen for me to us their own conveyancers, which are a local'ish company, have a no sale no fee arrangement (except disbursements) and overall the fee's don't seem too high).... £550 for my sale and £669 for my purchase (assuming it is over £300K) plus the VAT.....

I had been considering using a online firm such as conveyancing warehouse as well as get quoted from other local solicitors.

My agent said something about me paying £8 and their appointed conveyancers can start all the preliminary work on the sale (I thought most solicitors would do this anyway unlike for a purchase where some up front fee's such as search might need to be paid).

Also I actually have the deeds to my house - my lender never kept them when we remortgaged a few years back... so I am unsure if I should send these directly to my buyers solicitors - any advice on this please?

I don't feel pressurised by my agent but I want to make sure I am doing the right thing at the right time to avoid any unnecessary delays.

silvercar

How valuable are these buyers to you? If you instruct a solicitor and issue a contract to your buyers they will start to incur costs and are less likely to move onto another property than if you don't do anything.

If you haven't found a property in a few weeks time what are you going to do, sit tight or move into rented? Its a question your buyers will soon be asking.

dfarry

The buyers are very important to me... they also seem to be very nice people and the last thing I want them to do is incur costs and for it all to then fall through.

However our move is part of a relocation and we are only able to look for another property at weekends.... for the past 4 weekends we have been viewing properties in Sussex, we have made two offers and been declined (there is another thread about that)

Renting for me isn't an option because I don't want to put my family through the upheaval of two moves, as it is the kids are going to need to go to another school. Also we don't have sufficicient cash in our budget to allow us to rent and perhaps put our belongings into storage too.... I see renting as risky too because we might find ourselves waiting for months and end up with nothing.

silvercar

I totally agree with your views on renting. We started the legal work so we would keep our buyers. Eventually they had enough waiting around, we had found a house but there was a delay further up the chain, so we lost them.
We would have lost them sooner if we hadn't done the legal work. Most of the selling work can be re-used for future buyers if necessary.

We had always been very honest and said we wouldn't move into rented but ours buyers got very shirty with us.