Seller/Seller's solicitor causing delays

Jack1122_2

Hello,

I am currently in the process of purchasing a new build property, built by a private seller.

Our offer was made and accepted back in March before the build was complete. The build itself was fully completed back in June but I am still yet to exchange contracts.

My solicitor has been waiting for over 3 weeks for responses to the enquiries that were raised after we received the draft contract and other initial info.

After countless chases and numerous conversations with both our solicitor and the estate agent, we have established that a combination of a useless solicitor (on the sellers side) and the seller herself being an absolute nightmare to get hold of are what have caused this delay.

We are now in a race against time to get everything sorted before our mortgage offer expires (1st November) otherwise we will lose money on the product fees that we have already paid to the lender and will need to re-apply from scratch.

Someone has mentioned the idea of arranging an indemnity policy so that we will be able to go ahead with the purchase before receiving the responses to the enquiries, and if there were any issues (we aren't expecting there to be any as it is a new build and all other initial info has been OK) then we would be covered by this anyway. I'm not entirely sure how this works and if its something that would work in our situation or not.

Is this a viable option or are there any other ways, aside from constantly chasing, that we could get things moving before our deadline?

Thanks in advance for any help

Jack

eddddy

Depending on what the specific pre-contract enquiries are, indemnity policies might be relevant.

But I would be more worried about why the vendor wasn't replying.

The EA may try to convince you that it's just a scatty vendor, and useless solicitor. But I'd be tempted to start asking more questions. Is it because your solicitor's probing close to a problem that they don't want to tell you about?

e.g. Planning Permission compliance, Building regs compliance, 10 year guarantee...

Jack1122_2

Thanks for the reply, it turns out that the delay was actually being caused by the council, as it's a new build they needed to sign it off and the warranty couldn't be arranged until this was received.

Have now been told this has all been completed and on its way to our solicitor and that we can expect to be exchanging in the next couple of weeks, very relieved!