HOP - Firstbuy - Taking a long time

Stu_house_mover_1

Hi

We are selling our house and we have to involve HOP as it was purchased using first buy.

It looks like this process can take up to 12 weeks from start to finish. This seems like a very long time, and im concerned that it could affect the sale/purchase.

Has anyone else had experience of selling and using HOP or firstbuy? Would be good to know if the 12 weeks is a worst case and if it is shorter in practice.

marksoton

http://www.myfirsthome.org.uk/

Try giving them a call? Any anecdotal experiences aren't really going to help you anyway.

cairnsie13

Hi stu, we had dealings with HOP recently with homebuy direct which is the same sort of 12 week period. Our sale was completed 5 weeks into the process (they quote 6 weeks for the redemption figure and further 6 weeks to complete the transaction), once you have the redemption figure you can complete and sell your house, our redemption figure came at 5 weeks the remaining 6 weeks will be transferring of the funds etc. I would advise to have your valuation done asap as the first 6 weeks start from the day you email this with the form B. We found we had to pester them to find out information as the tracker wasn't always updated regularly.

Make sure your valuation meets the criteria as ours didn't at first and this took them 2 weeks to inform us of this therefore setting us back as the process had to start again. All that was missing in our case was a front sheet with the company logo on and this had to be resent. Maybe ring them once sent to see if there is anything obvious missing.

Stu_house_mover_1

Thanks Cairnsie13, very useful

Just to confirm, you were able to exchange & complete (move in) with just teh redemption figure?

We have posted the valuation and form b and think thats in good shape, so currently waiting on redemption figure.

Who did you pester? did you have to go through the myfirsthome.org help line?

Thanks again

cairnsie13

Yes we exchanged and completed our sale with just the redemption as long as you are not in negative equity on the house, your solicitor will send your mortgage balance to prove this. We only had around £1000 equity in our house so we were fine but this was due to house prices dropping significantly in our area.

We rang the HOP team directly just ask them for an update to see where they are as they tend not be organised as you would hope them to be. We have been moved into our new home for nearly 6 weeks so we are still waiting on them to change the land registry etc.

Hope this helps

cairnsie13

The best time to contact HOP team on phone I found was 10am would ring straight through any other times would be waiting for 10+ mins for an answer, check their phone opening times as it is between 10 and 4pm but they close their lines for an hour in between

awinter89

Hi Stu,
Thank you for your thread. We too are currently dealing with HOP. We sold our house early April and are moving into a new house which will be ready in August. We only found out a couple of weeks ago about the whole valuation etc saga with HOP because we bought our current house through HomeBuy Direct. Which was very frustrating as we could have started the ball rolling with HOP a long time ago.

I'm really stressing about losing the house we're buying because we have reserved it and they expect you to exchange contracts within about 6 weeks (we're 8 weeks in now and only just started the HOP process) so very concerned the house builders will put our new house back on the market!

I'm hoping and praying it won't take as long as six weeks - my brother in law's took two weeks last year. Did you have to chase them a lot? I've tried calling today but they're closed for staff training!!! I can feel my blood pressure rising by the minute....

cairnsie13

awinter89 we had the homebuy direct just like yourself, I felt it was such a stressful thing dealing with this thinking that the waiting around would jeopardise our sale, it didn't! We received our redemption figure after 5 weeks which you can then exchange and complete on ur house sale. I found the problem with HOP was they took 2 weeks to tell us that our first valuation wasn't up to scratch because it did not have a front cover n that was it, we had to get this front cover sorted and resend the valuation which then started the 6 weeks again. U will hear from HOP normally within 10 working days from your first initial email to say if they reject or accept your initial valuation not the figure of the property but if you have all the information they require in it. Good luck, we are still dealing with HOP as it is a 12 week process altogether and we have been moved for 6 weeks now so finalising everything off

skimper

We used help to buy when we bought our flat, so when we sold it we had to go through all this.
We had to get an independant valuer in & get a report from them, then we could fill in form B and send it off along with the valuation to HOP. Once they had this we had a redemption figure within a week! This was in March too when the rush to buy, buy to lets was going on.

It can take up to 6 weeks to get the redemption figure, as this you are free to sell. Then the remaining time is just for them to send a letter saying yes you've paid it off.

When we first read it saying it could take 10-12 weeks, we panicked too as we needed a quick sale, but it all went through pretty quick.

cairnsie13

A week! That's good going lol, I think the reason it was longer for us was because we had to have the developer of our house to confirm the valuation was fine to accept as well as the HOP team

awinter89

Thank you so much for everyone's replies! Makes me feel much better. The builders who we're buying from have assured me that as long as they can see we're doing everything we can it should be fine and to just keep them updated along the way as much as possible.

Cairnsie13 - what did your front cover have to consist of? I'm not sure ours has this by the looks.