Delayed Completion Penalty Fee

josh859

Hello all,

I was wondering if anyone could provide me with advice on my situation:

The purchase of my property was supposed to complete today. However, despite complete silence all day, I received a call from my estate agent at around 14:00 that my vendor's solicitor still hadn't received my funds, and to follow up.

I called my solicitor and was told that completion was still on track today and I would receive a call letting me know that it was complete. I did, however, it was a call from my solicitor telling me that they had failed to complete and now have to complete tomorrow.

According to my solicitor, they sent the Certificate of Title to my lendor 5 days ago. They were alerted this morning that the Certificate of Title was for the wrong mortgage offer (my mortgage offer got amended). My solicitor then sent an amended Certificate of Title to my lendor and it wasn't worked on in time, so now there is a penalty fee for delayed completion that I have to pay. My estate agent flippantly told me that this is 5% of the property value (WHAT).

So I called the completion team at my lendor. They told me that my solicitor is lying, and that my solicitor had the amended Certificate of Title (which was sent to them on the 8/10/2018) and should have known that they were sending my lendor the Certificate of Title for my old mortgage offer. This gave them 3 hours to send the funds which wasn't enough time. They told me that there is no way that they would pay this fine if it were them.

Many thanks in advance.

mrsvanderkamp_2

It sounds as though your solicitor did submit the certificate of title from your old mortgage offer; not efficient but mistakes do happen. What you will be charged will depend on what rate is in your contract. Typically the interest rate is 4/5% above base on a daily basis. So your estate agent is almost right except that it's not a straight 5% of the purchase price as clearly that would be thousands. If the purchase price was say £100,000 the interest for late completion for one day will amount to less than £20 which I would suggest your solicitor pays. The vendors solicitors may also charge an admin fee for the delayed completion of something like £200. Again it will be specified in the contract and again if payable I'd be asking your solicitor to pay it.

Hope that helps 🙂

maninthestreet

It's 'lender', not 'lendor'.

ritz55

If it’s delayed by a day then vendor may decide not to impose the penalty. The 5% is a annual interest rate. We had a similar situation many years ago and the penalty was ignored

PasturesNew

As you're completing today it'll be peanuts in the bigger scheme of things.

At some point it'll be clear who was in the wrong, you, or the solicitor - and that person will pay. If they had/sent the wrong paperwork or wrote down a wrong reference number and it's their fault it'll come out once they check the file and they'll pay and claim off their insurance policy (or not bother as the peanuts it costs will be less than the staff time to process it and somebody will simply get a b0ll0cking off their boss).

Congratulations on not attempting to complete on a Friday as, at least, you've now got the "luxury" of being able to sort this out when offices are open (Mon-Fri).