Our buyer's pulled out! Any strategy ideas?

moneyistooshorttomention

Personally - if I were your vendor and I suspected your solicitor had deliberately been told to "s...l...o...w down" then I would start feeling distrustful.

Been there/done that myself - and gave the vendor the benefit of the doubt that it was their solicitor (rather than themselves) that was the problem. However, that was only down to moving to a part of the country where I know things often go "slower" than people from my area are used to. That "benefit of doubt" was only for about a couple of weeks. Quite frankly - the vendor was downright lucky that I was prepared to "believe" him (possibly) for that couple of weeks. Even more lucky - because it emerged subsequently that the delay HAD been down to the vendor prevaricating....

Motto being that = your vendor may be feeling suspicious already about the speed your solicitor is going (or not - as the case may be). Dont throw something else into the mix. Tell them the truth. Let them judge for themselves - because, if you dont, you might lose them anyway.

Niv

I advise to tell them. I am currently going through the same issue as you and I told the person I was buying from right away - making it clear that I was still interested. I only received two weeks grace period though so feeling a little down at the moment

hazyjo

Niv wrote: »

I advise to tell them. I am currently going through the same issue as you and I told the person I was buying from right away - making it clear that I was still interested. I only received two weeks grace period though so feeling a little down at the moment

Aww chin up, they might not find anyone else straight away, or might change their minds about remarketing. Do everything you can to help yours sell...


Jx

jaydeeuk1

Ours pulled out same day we were setting a completion date. I've spoken to our vendors before and had offered to pay their EA fees if they held on for us to sell again, which they said was nice but they were in no rush and were happy to wait. Luckily our family have helped out and will go ahead regardless, but I do reccomend telling your vendors

Kynthia

I think waiting weeks to tell them would be out of order and would break down the trust between you. However I would wait a few days up to 1 week max. This is because it allows you to find out why your buyers pulled out, as you may follow up with the EA if here's doubts about the reason or more info needed, it allows to to try and start tosolve the problem if it's a problem with your property and gives you time to put it on the market and see how many viewings get booked straight away. This means when you update your seller you have more to tell them about what happened, what the plan is, how likely you are yo get another buyer quick and whether there's a chance the problem will be repeated. This allows them to make an informed decision and I don't think a few days is enough that they will feel that you've been deceiving them and wasting their time.

Hoploz

If the house you're buying is already empty, it sounds as if your vendors may not be dependent on the sale to make a purchase, which is in your favour. They may well be happy to wait a few more weeks.

This happened to me some years ago. I happened to slightly know the sellers, and therefore phoned them directly to explain my situation. That was that we decided to refinance our old house in order to still buy theirs, but that there would be a delay while this was arranged. They were fine with that, it was an executor's sale so no dependent chain.

However .... The EA took a different view! He was really cross that it had all been sorted out without him in between. He was very rude to me, demanded to know the exact details of our situation, telling me i had to keep him informed of everything, and he read it in a very different way to the actual sellers. He assumed his sale was lost and he'd put it back on the market, but he didn't need to, all was well (although we were in truth going mad getting everything arranged with our mortgage lady behind the scenes!)

Point is, I'm not saying don't tell them - you must, but get yourself a little bit organised - give it a day or two for some viewers through your door, perhaps a new offer, and it's a much better situation to present to your seller than just 'We've lost our buyer, it's all gone tits up!'

(BTW exchange and completion planned for the same day ... Iffy ... How would you feel if your buyer pulled out on that day instead? Mine pulled out the day before!)

Onawingandaprayer

Thanks for all the useful replies (and even the weird one saying I'd accused our buyer of being an a$£%hole (talk about reading between the lines!)

A few miscellaneous points

# We only had the offer accepted about 3 weeks ago and there are still a few issues to sort out re our survey on theirs. (Further inspections required.)

# Re telling our surveyor to slooooow down, we had previously ask them to go at warp-speed as although we had agreed with our buyer that we would rent if things went beyond the end of June, we were obviously trying to avoid that.

#The report from our EA is that our buyer had found a house she preferred! One assumes she'd still been looking in the 6 weeks since we accepted her offer. In the interim we'd spent £100 on a woodworm survey and £80 on a chimney survey (both no action required) in response to her surveyor's observations.

# It took us about three months to achieve her offer from first marketing the property.

glasgowdan

You may need to drop your price sadly. But yes, tell the sellers right away. If they think you're going to complete in 3 weeks, then you turn around the day before and say no, it could be another 3 months, you'll have NO chance of buying it. It's the decent and open way of proceeding.