conveyancing timeline?

humidex7

Hi everyone

I'm purchasing a vacant house with no chain, but due to the sellers shockingly slow solicitors, we've hit the 10 week mark and my solicitor ONLY JUST got the draft contract yesterday (after a lot of aggressive chasing). :mad:

Now, my solicitors will sending off the searches etc, but I can't for the life of me find any article online explaining how long these searches should take.

I've looked on my councils website, they say that they're returning 100% of searches in 10 days or less.

Does anyone have any ~average~ timescales for the other searches?

FYI: Mortgage offer was received probably a month ago and all sorted. Seller & I are ready to complete ASAP.

Thanks!

goldsounds

I'm also a FTB and my conveyancer has advised the bulk of the searches can take a few days bar the Local Council searches which need to be booked in can take 1-3 weeks depending on how busy there are...

humidex7

ahh I'm not a FTB (not that it makes any difference! Congrats on your purchase) I just wasn't in such a hurry last time so didn't really pay attention to the timescale!

that's useful to know. So like I said, my council returns 100% of searches in 10 days or less, and if the other searches take even less time, then I should have all of the searches in less than 2 weeks.

What stage are you at ATM?

Rambosmum

3 - 4 weeks on average for LA, coal mining and the other one! The LA one tends to be the longest so if your LA is doing it in 10 (working) days then you may get them back in 2 - 3 weeks.

Have you had a survey and put your mortgage application in?

wantonnoodle

We bought a chain free house at the start of the year. Our's seemed like a painfully slow process, but in hindsight it wasn't.

We had the offer accepted end October. Mortgage valuation highlighted need for additional surveys. We were in the process of arranging these when the contract arrived at our sols (3 weeks in). We told them to hold fire on the searches while we got the surveys etc done. Surveys highlighted some structural work needed and lender put a retention on the mortgage.

Mid December we negotiated with vendor, who agreed to get the work done at his expense, provided we would still pay the agreed price.

Work done week before Christmas, and certificates sent to lender who received them between Christmas and New Year, and lifted the retention first day back in January.

Searches requested first week in January. The council were quoting up to 20 days, however sols used private searches company who completed the searches in about a week to 10 days.

We then had a stressful time agreeing exchange and completion dates (sols on both sides seemed slow to communicate) in early Feb.

Completion agreed as 24th Feb with exchange on the Friday before (17th).

Our sol then went on holiday the week we were due to exchange, and the hand over to his backup was not done properly (not to mention a misunderstanding between sol and lender) so didn't happen. As we were still keen to complete the 24th, sol requested funds on the Monday he was back, but wouldn't exchange until he knew he had the funds. As a result we ended up exchanging on the Thursday with completion on the Friday.

In short, the first part of the process (surveys and structural work and getting the retention lifted) took what felt like an absolute age (10 weeks) while the second half of the process (the legals, searches, paperwork etc) seemed to pass in a bit of a blur - it took 6 weeks from searches being applied to completion. So, I guess we were at a similar stage to you in timeline when we put our searches in.

I would say that there is a good chance that things will progress pretty fast now, particularly if the searches come back clean, and there isn't anything major to query with the vendor. If its anything like our experience, we were frantically sorting and packing our stuff once the searches went in, and we just didn't feel like we had anywhere near enough time to be ready for completion.

Good luck!!

Newtown

We are in week 10 with no closing timeline on horizon. (very stressful)

ReadingTim

humidex7 wrote: »

Does anyone have any ~average~ timescales for the other searches?

It's a similar length to the length of the ~average~ piece of string.