Moving in before purchase is completed

Dollymix12

We are currently selling our house, answers to our buyers questions have gone back and if they are satisfactory we will only have completion and exchange left. My issue is with our purchase, we are still waiting for their lawyer to send the legal pack to ours so we are quite a bit off completion with this but the EA has advised that as the property empty if we need to move and we are not ready to complete that we can come to an arrangement! I am assuming this means we pay rent for a couple of weeks while waiting for everything to be sorted out?

Has anyone got any experience of this I'm just wondering how this would work and how it would be decided how much they would charge

steeeb

Do you need to sell in order to buy - part of a chain - ie. is any of the equity being used for the purchase?

You probably will be liable to 3% stamp duty, although you will get a refund if you sell the other home within 3 years - but you'll still have the outlay.

There are probably other things to consider.

ThePants999

There are probably fifty different legal speedbumps, and with the usual extreme risk aversion found on these forums, you're about to get them all highlighted with many posts including the words "barge pole" or "run".

What I'd say is that if you have a decent relationship with the vendor, you should be able to talk it through with them and come to a mutually satisfactory agreement, and although it'll carry more risk than normal, it will PROBABLY all be fine.

Dollymix12

steeeb wrote: »

Do you need to sell in order to buy - part of a chain - ie. is any of the equity being used for the purchase?

You probably will be liable to 3% stamp duty, although you will get a refund if you sell the other home within 3 years - but you'll still have the outlay.

There are probably other things to consider.

We are in the middle of selling and would not move until the house has been sold which has lead to my query we would have sold our house by the time we complete on the new house but may need to rent the new house for a number of weeks while waiting for the purchase to go through

Dollymix12

ThePants999 wrote: »

There are probably fifty different legal speedbumps, and with the usual extreme risk aversion found on these forums, you're about to get them all highlighted with many posts including the words "barge pole" or "run".

What I'd say is that if you have a decent relationship with the vendor, you should be able to talk it through with them and come to a mutually satisfactory agreement, and although it'll carry more risk than normal, it will PROBABLY all be fine.

Thanks :rotfl: we don't need to move in and rent but I don't want to slow our sale down so our alternative is to put our things instorage and move in with my MIL till it completes, this wouldn't be ideal though as it would mean basically moving twice

3mph

There is an advantage of moving stuff into storage, provided you are OK in the temporary place since you have time to sort out the new one without furniture in it.

Person_one

If I was selling there is absolutely no way I would ever let buyers move in before completion, regardless of my own circumstances. I imagine most competent solicitors would strongly advise against it too, so you really can't count on them being willing to do this!

Dollymix12

Person_one wrote: »

If I was selling there is absolutely no way I would ever let buyers move in before completion, regardless of my own circumstances. I imagine most competent solicitors would strongly advise against it too, so you really can't count on them being willing to do this!

I'm not, it was not something I have ever even considered which is why I was asking here for people's experiences on the subject, we are perfectly happy moving in with my MIL however this is something the EA has suggested which is why I wanted to see if anyone knew how this would work, the only benefit I can see is not having to move twice

ST1991

I do have experience of this, and whilst not ideal it meant we did not lose out on the house.

We were renting and our landlord at the time was selling.
The house we wanted to buy had tenants but were being given notice.
A million and one enquirers regarding the house (they had to remove a ROW due to past-past neighbors building a garage over it which took MONTHS as had to be agreed by all neighbors and lenders. urgh)

Anyway, in the end the house was empty, as they had given the tenants notice and we all hoped to be in shortly after they vacated. Paperwork took a LONG time, though, for the neighbors mortgage lenders to sign off a change to their deeds and seller footed the legal bills.

As they couldn't afford the mortgage on the empty house, it was either we move in to rent, or they find another tenant (increasing the timescale again). We met up with the sellers and they were very genuine, so agreed to do so albeit a little reluctantly. But we also needed somewhere to live, and rent would have only been going to someone else.
They drafted a tenancy agreement that had a mutual break-clause for when the house went through. They also agreed to return our rent deposit after a month (it was protected) when our legal fees kept going up. I ws pretty mad that they wanted a deposit, but that's life - they have to protect themselves too!

In some respect it was good. No moving or faffing about on D-Day. We got to 'try before you buy' as we hadn't exchanged yet. Made sure everything worked as it should. They had to renew their gas safety certificate whilst we were there.

And in other respects bad (it just didn't feel like ours after renting it for a few months)

But... i'm glad we did it, as we got the house and it's finally started to feel like home

PasturesNew

It is technically possible, in a few cases, for the inbound owner to rent under a license from the empty property owner. When this would be appropriate and allowed would be depending on the circumstances. For the majority of private owners selling a house they'd be advised against it by their solicitor.

If your circumstances did allow it, then it would be possible to occupy the premises on a "day by day" basis until it completes.

If, say, the seller had no mortgage on the property and it were empty and if you were well established property owners, who weren't a "risk" then it might be an option.

For the majority of people, this wouldn't be a solution that'd be "allowed" as there is the possibility that you could pull out of the purchase, or gazunder them - and they could have a heck of a lot of trouble getting you out again... which is where the risks lie.

davidmcn

If there's no contract for your purchase then you don't know that it will just be "a couple of weeks". It could be much longer, it might never happen. What happens if they (or you) try renegotiating after you've settled in?