Using second hand searches

Caracul

Hi,

Apologies if this has been posted before but I tried to search and couldn't find anything.

Due to the mortgage offer running out we have a month to complete buying our first house. The house has no chain and a sale recently fell through. The estate agents have stated that to help speed the process I could possibly get the searches from the solicitors of the other potential buyers.

Not only would this be quicker, but possibly slightly cheaper too.

What are the pitfalls to doing this? Is it acceptable to do this? Are the searches a pre-requisite for the mortgage and is the bank likely to have a problem with this?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
James

80schild

I doubt you would be able to do this if you are relying on a mortgage as they are quite strict about these things. We have a cash buyer for our house so I offered him all our search and survey results from when we bought the house 5 years ago so he could use this to decide whether or not to persue searches and a survey himself. He was happy with the information and decided not to-hwoever it could be different for a mortgage!

sonastin

Depends how old the searches are. 5 years old are well and truly out of date. During the era of HIPs, mortgage lenders liked searches to be less than 6 months old - and that sets the precedent for the lenders not requiring you to pay for the searches yourself. You might be alright if they weren't done that long ago.

Caracul

The sale fell through a week ago so I'm expecting that they are less than 4 weeks old. It sounds good that if they are fresh searches then they may be ok. Its more for the speed of the sale rather than any possible cost saving implications - although that may be a nice by product.

Is there anything I should watch out for apart from if they don't have all the searches I would like, or is a search a search?

Moomum

We had the same situation, we used previous buyers searches but got our own survey as you can't use there's if any thing does go wrong!

Richard_Webster

In the vast majority of cases there is no problem at all with this as long as they are up to date - although having said that is it really likely that a drainage search showing the location of sewers would have changed because since then the sellers decided to uninstall mains drainage and put a cesspit in the back garden?

I recently had a case where we did work for a client of mine and did all the searches and then he wanted the price reduced and the seller wouldn't agree so the seller put the place back on the market. My client paid me for the work including the searches. That was a few months ago. More recently another firm of solicitors approached us wanting to buy the search - they wouldn't pay the full price but my client
was obviously pleased to get a cheque from me for the amount I was able to recoup for him, which was a small unexpected windfall.

Caracul

Thanks for all the replies. I have confirmed with my own solicitors that they have no problem doing this - all the searches are charged at cost anyway, and it just means that its less work for them too.

On phoning the third party solicitors I was told I would have to pay full price for the searches 192gbp (for Local, Environmental and Drainage) but on the advice of my solicitors I phoned back and offered 100gbp, stating that they were of no use to the third party client. We agreed on 125 in the end so saved 67 pounds, but more importantly shortened the time needed to process the sale. The oldest search was from 28/02/2011.

unhappy_shopper

I apologise for being slightly off-topic.

How long does it take to do the searches? My solicitor completed all the requisite searches in a week when we bought 4 years back. Does it take more than that now? Thanks in advance for your replies.

Richard_Webster

How long does it take to do the searches? My solicitor completed all the requisite searches in a week when we bought 4 years back. Does it take more than that now? Thanks in advance for your replies.

Most searches other than the local search take about a week - environmental searches that are clear come back to me in about 2 hours! However the local authority search will depend on how fast/co-operative the local Council is - I think Northampton once did one electronically in 13 minutes - but they can take up to 6 weeks - 2 weeks would be typical.

tyler80

Searches in this area have a turnaround time of 3 days.