Solicitor requesting money from lender early

steveandel

Well we finally exchanged today for completion on Wednesday! :j

One small question though. We happened to notice that the mortgage advance was transferred from our lender Nationwide to our solicitors on Friday so we are already accruing interest on it even though we don't complete until Wednesday. Should the solicitors have done this as I was under the impression they got the mortgage advance on the day of completion and forwarded it straight onto the vendor? Do you think I could ask for them to reimburse at least some of the interest accrued in the meantime (over £70 accrued already)

silvercar

Normally solicitors transfer funds the day before completion so the funds are available to pay for your purchase from 9 am.

silvercar

Just had a thought, does the mortgage offer expire at the end of March? This would explain why the solicitor is getting the money on friday, if he left it any later your mortgage offer would have expired and you would need to be reapplying for your mortgage.

steveandel

Nope, the mortgage offer had plenty of time to run. I think they might just be being a bit keen! However, the planned completion date was always the 28th and it was never going to be any earlier than that so I still think they could have left if until tomorrow instead of last Friday and saved us some money :rolleyes:

silvercar

Half a week is 1% of the year. So 1% of a £100,000 mortgage at 5.5% is £55.

As the length of time is under a week, the solicitor doesn't automatically, under law society rules, have to account to you for the interest. If you feel he has been unnecessarily premature in securing the funds, you could ask for the interest.

Tiger_greeneyes

Don't forget - you should be getting interest from the solicitor for this money because it's in your client account.

Richard_Webster

How did Nationwide send it - by BACS or by CHAPs?

If by BACS it would take a few days to get there. So Nationwide might have sent it on Friday but it didn't arrive for a few days.

Your solicitor should have told Nationwide completion was on Tuesday because it is just too big a risk to take to have the money arrive at say 3pm on the day of completion (too late under the standard contract terms) and for the solicitors to then have to move up it a possibly lengthy chain of transactions! Some lenders will not guarantee when on the day of completion that it arrives and that isn't much help if you are wanting to move in!

It often happens with CHAPs (theoretically instant) payments that they arrive 2 days before completion but the borrower gets charged for the extra day. I tell my clients they will probably be charged for an extra day because it is just too big a risk to take if something goes wrong and the money doesn't come the day of completion.

As with many of these issues the easiest thing for OP to do is 'phone up solicitors and ask if money came Friday and if so, why. There is probably a logical explanation.

As a conveyancing solicitor I believe the information given in the post to be useful but I accept no liability except to fee-paying client

mrsc_4

Our money arrived the day before as did our buyers, we were told this would happen that the solicitor would request them a day early, that was fine with us to be honest at least there we knew there would be no hold ups.