The NEW waiting to exchange thread...

Navikate

Hello all! 

Me and my husband are in the process of buying our first house! I am going to give a bit of background information and would like to know roughly what sage we are at and how long we can expect to wait to get our keys! We don’t really know anyone who has bought a house in the last ten years and we feel like we don’t have a clue what is going on! 

1)We booked viewing for a house on 16/04/21 and got a DIP through a broker before we  viewed it.
2) The DIP was in my husbands name only as I have shocking credit and broker advised this. 

3) We didn’t like the first house so continued to book viewings.
4) 20/04/2021 - House number 2 (leasehold) came online. I had been refreshing Rightmove app every few mins throughout my work day, so I was able to quickly ring EA and get the first viewing on the property for 3pm the next day. 
5) We knew before we viewed it that we wanted it - 3 bedrooms, a drive and a garage in an area we know well. Empty house. This was so much more than anything else we’d looked at in our price range. 

6) 21/04/2021 Put offer in as we sat outside the house in the car while the next people were still looking around. 

7) 21/04/2021 offer accepted less than an hour after viewing. 

8) the same day we sent all of our paperwork to EA including DIP
9) 22/04/2021 we get a call from the mortgage broker saying that as we are married, we would both need to be on the mortgage! Queue panic over my credit rating! New application submitted with me on. 

10) 30/04/2021 pack received from solicitor including pre contract, copy of leasehold, title deeds, fittings sheet etc. Filled in and returned by 05/05/2021.
11) searches started 07/05/2021
12) 08/05/2021 we have private survey - results everything is fine
13) mortgage accepted (?!?) depending on lenders survey
14) 11/05/2021 lenders survey carried out
15) 13/05/2021 lenders survey result back - MORTGAGE IS GO! 

Now what? What happens next? Is there anyway of making things move faster?  What could we doing to make things easier for everyone involved? 

THANKS! 

sassypurple

ohdarn said:

I don't think there are sufficient words in any human language that can accurately convey what I'm feeling right now. It's like a weary resignation combined with a howling rage.
Very odd.

Just sums up how we feel to offer accepted Nov 19th - should of been straightforward FTB for our sale and a purchase from someone moving to rented. Nearly 7 months on our sale was completed 3 weeks ago so we didn't lose our buyers. Still waiting for a charge to be removed from land registry by a completely incompetent loan company. 
Hope everyone gets good news soon - only thing keeps me going is seeing people finally getting there.

n0438

Aaaargh forgive me whilst I scream!
So chain of 7, 6 of us agree to exchange next week, complete the following.  Except the top.

They allegedly can't secure a rental until they exchange but won't exchange until they've found something.  But how do we know what's going to come onto the rental market, so we could be waiting forever. Potentially after end of June!

Surely if the majority agree then that trump's just one person wanting to do something else??? Can't they just go into an air b&b  whilst they look? 3 of us have mortgage offers running out imminently. I am so mad so forgive my rant.

Any words of wisdom that anyone can share? 🙂

Natbag

@Navikate - you're doing well for 3 weeks in, but in short, no, other than keep chasing the parties involved for updates as that can sometimes prompt quicker responses and actions. I think you'll be waiting for the searches to come back, and then any enquiries, and once everyone is in that position you can look to exchange. There is a handy guide on this website about the process that is worth reading.
Are you first time buyers? Is there a chain above you? There are so many things that can cause delays, more so in a chain, and things are taking longer at the moment as everyone is so busy. You can see my timeline below  

Natbag

@sassypurple - yes, it's good to see others moving, gives us hope doesn't it?! We had FTB and no chain above, ok, so two of those linked, but yep, month 6 here now since we put the properties up for sale. Zzzzzz. 

Navikate

Natbag said:

@Navikate - you're doing well for 3 weeks in, but in short, no, other than keep chasing the parties involved for updates as that can sometimes prompt quicker responses and actions. I think you'll be waiting for the searches to come back, and then any enquiries, and once everyone is in that position you can look to exchange. There is a handy guide on this website about the process that is worth reading.
Are you first time buyers? Is there a chain above you? There are so many things that can cause delays, more so in a chain, and things are taking longer at the moment as everyone is so busy. You can see my timeline below  

That’s good hear that we are moving well! 

We are first time buyers living in rented that we have to give 1 months notice on. There is no chain, and the house is empty. 

My uncle is surveyor and has looked over the house for us and has done several lenders surveys on that estate and says there’s never any major problems on the houses there.

BountyBlink

n0438 said:

Aaaargh forgive me whilst I scream!
So chain of 7, 6 of us agree to exchange next week, complete the following.  Except the top.

They allegedly can't secure a rental until they exchange but won't exchange until they've found something.  But how do we know what's going to come onto the rental market, so we could be waiting forever. Potentially after end of June!

Surely if the majority agree then that trump's just one person wanting to do something else??? Can't they just go into an air b&b  whilst they look? 3 of us have mortgage offers running out imminently. I am so mad so forgive my rant.

Any words of wisdom that anyone can share? 🙂

Hi 👋🏻 ok so here is it from the other side of the coin. We competed on our sale on 23 April as our chain above fell apart & we agreed to go into rented. We thought it would be easy to find something. We were wrong. 

Firstly, the law changed recently that landlords need to give a minimum of 6 months notice to tenants and now landlords have to pay the inventory, check out and applicate fees, so nowadays landlords do not want to give less than a 1 year tenancy. (We only needed a few months) so that was the first issue to find something. 

Also because of covid a lot of landlords have been  selling their property portfolios and therefore the rentals available are diminishing along with tenants needing to find an onward rental because their landlords are selling. 

We also have a 4 year old and a dog. 

So, when I started ringing round the agencies I was told, that rentals were being loaded onto the system and being let agreed same day, subject to credit checks and that for everyone rental there were 15 applicants wanting the property. So it was a bun fight. 

We looked into air Bnb’s and the best we could find for 4 weeks at at times was £500 per week! When you factor in storage costs it was an obscene amount of money. So renting was the only way to do it. We did eventually find a 4 month tenancy in a small 2 bed flat, that would accept our dog, but I had to fight for it lol. 

Our chain were piling on pressure on us and it made me so miserable given that we were willing to break the chain, let them eventually exchange but they couldn’t be considerate of how hard we were trying and how hard and cut throat the rental market is right now. We nearly pulled out all together because The stress The chain below put on us was immense.

its cost is £4000 for 4 months rent, £400 a month in storage, will be two
lots of removals £2000 and we hope to complete on our purchase by end of June. So to break the chain it has cost us £7000
so, all I can say is have hope they will find something but also be mindful that the stress to anyone breaking a chain is huge along with a huge amount of cost. Our chain offered no money up for us to break the chain, but they did make us feel bad for taking time to find something. It wasn’t for the want of trying. 

You will get there! 

Justonemorecupoftea

Feeling sick with worry that our buyers are going to withdrawn due to information we disclosed to them about the house. It's a minor issue that has caused us no problems since it has been rectified. I wish I could chat to them directly rather than everything going through the EA. I suspect we'll be left hanging over the weekend.
They are sort of cash buyers and haven't had a survey done so as I've said previously they don't really have anything to lose (although they did like our house which is pretty unique).
I've got all of the forms to fill in for the solicitors and I'm not sure I can face it with this hanging over me.

Rant over.

On the bright side if they are happy to proceed it should be relatively plain sailing from here...

BountyBlink

n0438 said:

Aaaargh forgive me whilst I scream!
So chain of 7, 6 of us agree to exchange next week, complete the following.  Except the top.

They allegedly can't secure a rental until they exchange but won't exchange until they've found something.  But how do we know what's going to come onto the rental market, so we could be waiting forever. Potentially after end of June!

Surely if the majority agree then that trump's just one person wanting to do something else??? Can't they just go into an air b&b  whilst they look? 3 of us have mortgage offers running out imminently. I am so mad so forgive my rant.

Any words of wisdom that anyone can share? 🙂

But... in terms of a solution for you. What we wanted was at least 6 weeks between exchange and completion. Given the fast moving rental market we wanted to exchange and then have 6 weeks to find something. The chain were not willing to agree to this but did agree to 4 weeks between exchange and completion. However the pushy one at the bottom had various things o/s on his mortgage being offered so in the end we had less than 2 weeks between but thankfully by then I had found the flag we are in. 

So if you did want a solution maybe suggest 4 weeks between exchange and completion. Or the 6 parties in the chain covering a couple of months in an air bnb and storage £4000 (£2000 air bnb, £1000 first moving costs, £1000 storage) If everything paid £700 towards the top of the chain they might go with that! 

We would have done 😉

amyr

amyr said:

However, the solicitor is still not satisfied from a money laundering perspective. Our buyer has some of their deposit coming from family, and they need to provide more evidence to satisfy their solicitor before we can move forward. They obviously do have their mortgage offer, but I don't know enough to say whether that gives us any reassurance?

This is still causing us stress. EA is pushing them to provide the paperwork ASAP. 

Given the huge delays we've had with paperwork being returned, and our need to move before the end of May, we've had to start becoming more forceful. Doesn't come naturally to me, nor feel particularly comfortable! 

We've got a week away next week (delayed honeymoon: as well as a failed house sale, the last 12-months also saw us have two cancelled weddings before we finally eloped in December). It's going to be a mammoth effort to attempt to switch off, so I've been pre-drafting emails I can fire off as needed, chasing buyers / relisting the house / etc, with limited effort. All bases covered, so low is my faith in our buyer.