Anyone bought a home that is in the process of being part exchanged?

scottishgirl87

We had an offer accepted on a property at the end of November, have our mortgage offer in place and are waiting to conclude missives (Scotland). The property was described as 'chain-free' but we later realised that the property has infact been part-exchanged for a new build elsewhere. The problem is that the developer doesn't actually yet own the property as the sale of it to them from the current owner hasn't yet taken place and we have no idea when this will happen.

We're getting extremely frustrated as our solicitor received the contract mid-December and went back to the developer's solicitor with some queries and to request amendments, and had been chasing them since for any sort of input! Our solicitor has also requested the title deeds several times in that space of time (the last month) and again, nothing. I understand Christmas/New Year have been in the way but we're now talking 2 working weeks before Christmas and at least 1 week after, the only reason we haven't yet concluded missives is due to this and the developer seems to be holding us back.

Has anyone else been in this position and did your sale all go through ok in the end? After speaking to the EA apparently developers are notorious for this and they have had instances when people haven't found out that they are taking ownership of the property until the day before! Am I just being an impatient FTBer or is there anything we can do to speed things along? At the moment we feel as if we are in limbo as to whether or not we're actually moving at the beginning of next month and we need to get things organised like time off work, etc.

Fortheloveofmoney

We haven't bought a part exchanged house but we have just sold one.

The builder agreed to buy our place at the end of August. They reduced the price (we already had it on the market) and it went under offer within days. We moved out at the end of October and the new people moved in at the end of November.

One of the main advantages of part exchanging with a builder is that you get to stay in your house until your new build is ready. I guess for some this could be months. Great for the new builder purchasers but not so good for those that buy the part exchanged property.

We were originally told that our new build would be ready in September but this got pushed out to October. The people buying our old house off the builder were told December. We only found this out because they turned up one night to talk to us about it.

When buying a new build you are given notice on completion when you exchange contracts. This means that you don't have a fixed date but are given 14 days notice to complete when the new build is ready. The people that bought our place were given the same deal by the builder.

This all happened in England and I'm not sure if it works differently in Scotland but I thought this post might help you understand why some of the delays are happening.

scottishgirl87

Fortheloveofmoney wrote: »

We haven't bought a part exchanged house but we have just sold one.

The builder agreed to buy our place at the end of August. They reduced the price (we already had it on the market) and it went under offer within days. We moved out at the end of October and the new people moved in at the end of November.

One of the main advantages of part exchanging with a builder is that you get to stay in your house until your new build is ready. I guess for some this could be months. Great for the new builder purchasers but not so good for those that buy the part exchanged property.

We were originally told that our new build would be ready in September but this got pushed out to October. The people buying our old house off the builder were told December. We only found this out because they turned up one night to talk to us about it.

When buying a new build you are given notice on completion when you exchange contracts. This means that you don't have a fixed date but are given 14 days notice to complete when the new build is ready. The people that bought our place were given the same deal by the builder.

This all happened in England and I'm not sure if it works differently in Scotland but I thought this post might help you understand why some of the delays are happening.

Thank you, it has helped seeing it from a different perspective. I was already thinking that perhaps the current owners new-build isn't yet ready. As much as we would like to get moved in we are pretty flexible as to when (within reason) but it would be nice of them to let us know! Ironic as they originally said they would only accept our offer if we agreed to a move-in date of X.

LallyHay

ScottishGirl87 - we are almost in an identical situation to you. Buying a house that has been taken in PX by developer, but they don't yet owner. When offer was made they were saying we needed to move in early Dec, but didn't send our solicitor anything until early Dec and now enquiries are taking forever. I dropped a note through current owners door and he replied to say their new build isn't ready & it was supposed to be ready end of Nov. They were as fustrated as us! Sounds like it's a common thing to happen then, and we all just have to wait until the developer decides they are ready. Ours wants everyone to exchange & complete at the same time, so in reality i guess they will never own the house we are purchasing.

scottishgirl87

LallyHay wrote: »

ScottishGirl87 - we are almost in an identical situation to you. Buying a house that has been taken in PX by developer, but they don't yet owner. When offer was made they were saying we needed to move in early Dec, but didn't send our solicitor anything until early Dec and now enquiries are taking forever. I dropped a note through current owners door and he replied to say their new build isn't ready & it was supposed to be ready end of Nov. They were as fustrated as us! Sounds like it's a common thing to happen then, and we all just have to wait until the developer decides they are ready. Ours wants everyone to exchange & complete at the same time, so in reality i guess they will never own the house we are purchasing.

Really appreciate you replying as I didn't get much luck on Google and it's good to hear of others in the same situation! I don't fancy approaching the current owner, however, they did tell us which development they're moving to and I'm tempted to contact them on the pretence of being a potential buyer interested in the development to shed any light on when it should be completed.

Have to say, it does sound as though we won't get the keys on the agreed date early next month and I do think you're right regarding the developer never actually owning the property.

scottishgirl87

Can anyone advise any further as we are still no further forward and our originally agreed moving in date is 2 weeks on Friday.

Would it be reasonable to say that if we don't hear by the end of this week if our original moving in date stands then we will start looking at other properties? We're at the stage we need to know now so that we can arrange annual leave, deliveries, etc. and we are quite prepared to walk away (and yes we do know we won't be able to finalise a sale anywhere else to move in on the same date).

Feel we need to do something!

romi-j

scottishgirl87 wrote: »

Can anyone advise any further as we are still no further forward and our originally agreed moving in date is 2 weeks on Friday.

Would it be reasonable to say that if we don't hear by the end of this week if our original moving in date stands then we will start looking at other properties? We're at the stage we need to know now so that we can arrange annual leave, deliveries, etc. and we are quite prepared to walk away (and yes we do know we won't be able to finalise a sale anywhere else to move in on the same date).

Feel we need to do something!

Hi Scottishgirl I'm not in the exact same position but supposedly moving out in 2 weeks and not even had written acceptance on the house we made an offer on. Our solicitor is also useless at communicating and has left it up to us to chase other parties.

I understand your frustration as I also need to know in order to arrange deliveries. Feel like you're paying solicitors money for nothing at times! Hope it all goes through for you

LallyHay

Hi again ScottishGirl87. Still no nearer our purchase either, it is now a month and half since original date! When I looked through documents that our solicitor had been able to get from the developers solicitor, there are the details of the current owners solicitor on there. So i guess what is happening is every time my solicitor contacts the developers solicitor, they then have to contact owners solicitor hence adding even more delay to the process. I phoned the estate agents who we are purchasing through and asked them to chase. They said that the current owners are having a meeting late this week as there was issue with new build...how true that is I don't know. It just seems like it is taking forever and getting no closer (no more documents received since before xmas!).

scottishgirl87

It's so frustrating isn't it? Our solicitor still hasn't had any responce to queries, everytime she calls them they say they will get back to her and then they don't.

We've lost all patience now and are just fed up of the whole thing.

scottishgirl87

Well someone must have heard me - had a call this morning to say developer is taking ownership next week so we should be still good to go for moving early next month.

Finally feel like we're getting somewhere!

AlexMac

Good luck- as our experience wasn't particularly inspirational or helpful.
Offered on a property which was already owned by the new-build developer having been accepted in part exchange and bought by them.

Trouble was, they were in the business of selling blocks of new builds- not isolated 'second-hand' homes, so obviously, working on our purchase was on nobody's to-do list, even though you'd think they'd want shot of it. Weeks passed and they didn't respond to our solicitor's enquiries; we got frustrated- it was a BTL and we wanted to get it bought and tenanted! Then it was badly damaged by a water leak from the flat above- but no-one in the Development Company would accept this as a problem, nor negotiate a reasonable modest discount on the sale price we'd agreed months earlier for the cost, hassle and delay likely to arise if we bought it damaged then started to deal with insurers, builders, decorators etc.

So we walked away with wasted legal/search, etc costs of £700.

Glad yours is back on track