Vendor wants to exchange with no completion date?

ElsieMonkey

Don't exchange without a completion date - that would be madness. Once you exchange you can't pull out without major financial loss, and going into it without an agreed completion date leaves you sitting on a fence for an unknown length of time. Also, what happens if something goes wrong with the sellers purchase of the new build? If they don't want to lose you as their buyer (which I imagine they won't since it's funding their move to the new place!) then they will have to go into rented until their new build is ready for them to move into. This is completely reasonable and normal. We're selling our flat at the moment and from the start decided we would go into rented in order not to lose a buyer, since we knew it would take us longer to find somewhere to buy than to sell (selling in London, buying outside of the bubble). This is the vendors issue, not yours. You can choose to be understanding and accommodating, meet them half way, suggest a completion date X amount of weeks from exchange (usually it's 2-4 weeks, so maybe 6 weeks would be fair and give the PLENTY of time to find rented accommodation). Say if a completion date can't be agreed within the next 2 weeks, then you are left no choice but to pull out. Honestly, there are ALWAYS other houses. I know it may not seem that way at the time, but there are and there will be. We sold out flat twice last year, both times fell through, so we had to let go of the property we were buying. Under offer again now and there have been other properties I would consider comparable or even better than what we were going to go for.