Sale completes in 3 weeks but purchase yet to exchange!

Sedge123

Your vendors are under no obligation n to you as you haven!!!8217;t exchanged on your purchase. You or they could walk away at any point up to exchange with no financial penalties.
If you try to pressure them into exchanging they may well pull out of the whole deal, they seem a bit flakey anyway to be honest after their purchase history.
As other said, you need to secure somewhere to live for your family in 3 weeks time.

fudgecat

Our vendor died between exchange and completion, leaving us committed to completing on the sale of our house in Surrey, with nowhere to go - legally! We were moving to Norfolk. Easier said than done getting caravans and short term rental at this time of year due to holiday season.
We found that we could - with the vendors permission (in this case the vendors nephew, who was due to inherit after probate was granted) - move into the property that we had not yet purchased "under license". It is a sort of legalised squat, as I understood it. We were not allowed to "do" anything to the property (it was a doer upper) until we completed - which was nearly 3 months!
I hope this information may be of some help.

Hoploz

It was a mistake to exchange on the sale simply to help your buyers avoid an overlap on the rent. That's their problem - you won't make this mistake again!

All you can do is put pressure on your sellers to break the chain their end, seeing as it is them changing their minds that has brought on this predicament. But ultimately you cannot force them to sell. And theres always a chance they could get too stressed and pull out altogether, and then where would you be?

You need to look into rentals. I wonder whether the estate agent can help you with this ... They often have rental departments as well, or can recommend other letting agents.

It sounds easy to just do air bnb or a holiday caravan but in practice you've got all your stuff to store and if you look into that you'll find it's not cheap so prob best to keep your furniture with you.

This will cost you a few thousand and its possible your sellers could take pity and offer those compensation, but they are under no obligation to do so since it is you jumping the gun on your sale which has caused it.

I wish you good luck. A horrible position to find yourself in

exoteric

Hi everyone,

Thanks all of you for your support and suggestions; it was really helpful just to share our situation with you. I just wanted to give you an update: today, after a lot of wrangling and numerous calls and emails, we finally exchanged contracts with our sellers with an agreed completion date which matches our own sale completion date, so we will move straight in and will not need to live in a caravan after all.

It was a really tricky one - our sellers clearly do not live in the real world (they asked us if they could leave their cat with us until they complete on their own purchase) but they eventually accepted that they are the ones who caused this mess by changing their purchase property for the third time with weeks to go and they have agreed to move in with family as they always said they would. We threatened (but never actually intended) to pull out of our sale and cause the entire chain to collapse, and ultimately that was what got it done.

Some people here (and in person) have asked why on earth we exchanged with our buyers without exchanging with our sellers. I admit this was unorthodox, but our house was hard to sell and we are very keen to move areas so we needed our buyers. Everything was in step until our sellers changed their purchase property the first time and we then had our buyers pressing to exchange. They had to give 2 months’ notice on their rental and wanted to get things locked in - I am very sure that if we had refused to exchange until now (or even a month after they were pressing for it to happen) our buyers would have walked away and we would have definitely lost this house. So whilst we could have saved ourselves a lot of hassle by holding off for simultaneous exchange, if we had our time again we would still make the same choice. But hopefully we are not moving again for a very long time, if ever!

Thanks again guys. Now we just have to hope the sellers leave on time, don’t leave the house in a complete state and take their blooming cat with them!

Exoteric

jbainbridge

Hmmm your vendor appears to have helped you out big time. Good luck with the move!

franklee

Glad to hear it worked out :j

beedeedee

Good luck with the move!

theGrinch

Good luck!

I was in the same boat and it made for a tense last few weeks.

Exchanged on my sale 4 weeks ago and then exchanged on my purchase only on Friday. Biggest hold up was solicitors on holiday which cost us a over a week.

I made it a little easier by only looking at chain free properties with the possibility of a rental option.

buglawton

I once encountered a bad chain. Broke out of the situation by selling up, moving out and self & OH going into serviced accommodation with all belongings in storage. It worked out well and gave us the opportunity to place an instant chain free offer when finally the right house to buy came up. Our accom had cooking facilities and cost about double of a 1 bed flats rent, with 1 weeks notice to give. For a couple with no kids yet Id definitely recommend this idea.