Buyer position changed - what would you do?

urbanmyth

Thank you all for your thoughts. Will update in due course (EA currently on annual leave!).

Mrs_Z

I have seen agents put houses back on the market, listing them on Rightmove, etc and when you phone them for a viewing, they tell me that they actually got a sale agreed but it's not progressing fast enough so they have just relisted it to 'scare' the buyer (but are not actually taking on any viewings). Seems reasonable to me as long as they are upfront with prospective viewers/buyers. Worth a try I say.

urbanmyth

An update from me. I'm sorry it's taken so long and I'm sorry the below is so long.

I worded the original question without suggesting whether I was the buyer or seller. This wasn't to intentionally mislead anyone but I wanted views from both sides without being judged.

We are the buyer. We offered on the assumption that we wouldn't have to sell our existing property in order to complete because we have sufficient funds for deposit, etc in the bank and our incomes can easily pay for two mortgages without any strain on our finances. We were always planning on selling but didn't want to have to be in a chain so we thought offering as a 'no chain' buyer would be fine given our affordability.

Well that was extremely naive. What I didn't factor in is that despite our high incomes, we had a LTV (90%). We had a bit of a shock when the mortgage offer came through with a clause that we had to be released from our first mortgage before completion. Lender told us they would only consider removing the clause if we could stump up a higher deposit, which we simply can't do, ironically because the extra equity is stuck in the property we didn't think we'd have to sell in a hurry.

(As an aside - the government's ridiculous 3% SDLT = the additional deposit required by the lender to get us to an 85% LTV.)

Anyway...I got hold of the agent. Explained all of this. Told them we really, really want the house and we're trying to do everything we can to meet the target exchange date, including seeking a new lender that would allow two residential mortgages and at the same time, chasing our [FTB] buyer with a stick so that we can simultaneously exchange.

We also accepted that if the vendor was annoyed with this turn of events and decided to re-market, we would lose the house.

Agent came back to me after speaking to vendor (an agonising few days of waiting, I must say). Firstly - he said everyone (vendor and agent) appreciated our total honesty, and that we had raised the issue as soon as we discovered it, rather than getting to the target exchange date then informing them we have a problem. They realise it would probably take longer to re-market and find a new buyer than to wait for us to organise ourselves. We are grateful to them for their understanding and patience.

In the grand scheme of things, we're probably looking at a couple of weeks which wouldn't have been a big deal, but that lands on the Christmas holiday season, which would drag things out further still.

So we're chasing both routes to a quick exchange - new mortgage app via a broker (which I'm not confident will go ahead given our LTV), and continuing to 'gently' get our buyer's conveyancer to pull his finger out.

We would be devastated if it all fell through and we blame our own naivety. We just looked at our monthly affordability rather than what the lender would make of our LTV. A painful lesson learned and it's been an uncomfortable journey so far, but maybe in a few weeks time I will update this post from our new 'dream' home...

I know this is long but hopefully our experience will help someone somewhere - I searched for lots of similar experiences on this forum when this happened to us but couldn't find the same.