Mortgage offer condition question

catmansam

We are in the process of selling our house and are in a small chain comprising of us, our buyer and their buyer. We are moving into rented property and the other end of the chain are also in rented. We accepted a below asking price offer approx eight weeks ago.

The sale has progressed (albeit a bit slowly) to this point and we are about to exchange.

Although there has been a lot of pressure on us to give a fixed completion date over the last five weeks, we have been consistent right from accepting the offer, that we would only be in a position to do this once the buyer was ready to exchange (i.e. all thier searches had been completed, mortgage offer agreed etc).

On Thursday last week we agreed a completion date and were informed that exchange would take place Friday. Late on Friday we got a call from our solicitor to say that the buyer had had to obtain another mortgage offer (their previous one was only 5 weeks old and would be 12 weeks old on the agreed completion date) due to the completion date changing and this new offer would require another survey.

We have never agreed a completion date other than the one on Thursday last week, so are a little confused how this situation could arise. Our buyers mortgage provider is Northern Rock.

Can anyone shed any light on this and how it might be handled? Is this some sort of negotiating ploy on our buyers behalf?

kingstreet

A mortgage offer typically has six months before it goes stale and at that point a new valuation would be required. It may also have a product deadline, but even that appears unlikely to be the issue here as such a short timespan has elapsed.

If you have one, ask your selling agent to question the buyer on the issue and let us know what comes back.

catmansam

Kingstreet, thanks for your reply.

We have already queried with the selling agent and they say that the mortgage provider were informed of a completion date of the 1st Sept (which we have no knowledge of) and as the agreed date was the 5th Sept the buyers had to get another offer (from the same provider) and this came attached with a condition of another survey (specifically a wall tie check?. All sounds very suspicious to us.

NeverAgain_2

catmansam wrote: »

Kingstreet, thanks for your reply.

We have already queried with the selling agent and they say that the mortgage provider were informed of a completion date of the 1st Sept (which we have no knowledge of) and as the agreed date was the 5th Sept the buyers had to get another offer (from the same provider) and this came attached with a condition of another survey (specifically a wall tie check?. All sounds very suspicious to us.

I had a small retention put on my mortgage because of wall ties.

After speaking to a couple of builders, I formed the impression wall ties were something and nothing.

One builder said ties were sometimes a scam in that the surveyor knows it gives his client the chance to negotiate the price down a little, plus it gives the impression a thorough job has been done.

Only a few hundred pounds was involved, but I didn't bother getting the ties done, and the wall is still standing 10 years later.