house buying stress! !

nimo20

Monday of last week we accepted a bid on our property and in turn had a bid accepted on a house we hope to buy. Our buyer is a buy to let and the house we are buying is chain free.
We are currently in limbo waiting for our buyer to arrange a survey. We've been assured by their solicitor that they are keen but as yet we've had nothing concrete. Our financial adviser has told us to wait until we have a date for the survey before we pay any money to the solicitor or process our mortgage application. I get that he doesn't want us to lose money if anything happens but this just feels like we're wasting time.
Any advice would be greatly received.

ShALLaX

Seven days isn't long when it comes to house-buying. Give them some time to pick a surveyor and get things in order.

moneyistooshorttomention

I was told (by my EA in my case) that I should wait for my own buyer to have (and, I would assume, approve) their survey on my current house before I went ahead and got the survey done on the place I am buying.

Beyond that, I was told not to start the "legals" off until I had had my survey done on place I am buying and approved it.

That's exactly what I did in the event. There was a bit of a "spanner thrown in the works" by my own buyer finding minor (ie few hundred £s worth of work) defect on my place after having their survey. That resulted in me being upset that I had gone ahead and had the survey done on place I am buying (ie because I hadn't realised there might be "quibbles" about the survey on my current place). The quibbles were resolved and it turned out, in the event, to have been okay that I had gone ahead and had my own survey on house-to-be done...but there were some nerve-racking moments where I wondered whether the quibbles would amount to having to forget about my current buyer and find another one instead and being at risk of having wasted my survey money on the place I am getting. All was well in the event...but I think I got a few more grey hairs in the process whilst waiting to check my buyer was still proceeding as per plan.

I understand the reasoning is that the 1st buyer in chain "proves their intent" by spending money on their survey on yours, so that you have some indication that they really mean their offer before you go ahead and start up your own "work to buy the place you want".

m0t

I am just going through the buying process as an FTB and it took 2 weeks from the point of speaking to the mortgage company to the surveyor phoning the vendors up and making the appointment, and this was with us doing everything as quickly as we could to make it happen.

Windsorcastle

I accepted an offer early June and, despite vigorous requests and chasing, the buyer's surveyor finally rang me on 10th July to book the survey a week later. The surveyor said there is a huge backlog because so many surveyors were laid off during the recession and now that things have picked up in the housing market (in London anyway), there aren't enough of them to meet demand.