How long did your longest purchase or sale take (looking at a record)?

UnderOffer

NortheastEA said:

morning - lets see is anyone can beat sale agreed on 30/6/2014 with completion on the 18/9/20 - same buyer, same price - issues were it was a deceased estate with an housing association and the council having a registered interest along with an unregistered title and the seller had no will and no close relatives .......

You win. 

Davesnave

ProDave said:

Is this the sale process after you get an offer to completion?  Or time from putting on the market to getting a sale?

From first accepted offer to completion for us was 16 months, but the purchasers weren't the same people and there were two other couples in between times.

Main reason was the Crash of 2008/9 including the Northern Wreck debacle, but also wobbly people with odd ideas and few morals. As it turned out, they probably did us a favour, but it didn't feel like it at the time!

Bad_Accountant

13 months from offer to completion coming this Friday. It was really two parts though!

Offer accepted Nov 2019, appallingly slow sellers’ solicitors held it up. We were near completion in March 2020 but we had to pull out as OH very close to losing job due to Corona. 

We then re-offered as it was still up for sale in Sept 2020, were accepted and exchanged last week. 

2bFrank

My cousins house that he bought took nearly 1 and a half years to buy. Seller died just before exchange, everyone was keen to carry on but had to wait for probate and all the extra stuff, was a nightmare.

FTB_Help

annetheman said:

For me, this is the infamous and elusive EWS1 form... So 9 months to the day since I started my purchase, I'd like to find out from others:

Wow, you could have made and birthed a child in that time! Good luck hope all goes well

annetheman

NortheastEA said:

morning - lets see is anyone can beat sale agreed on 30/6/2014 with completion on the 18/9/20 - same buyer, same price - issues were it was a deceased estate with an housing association and the council having a registered interest along with an unregistered title and the seller had no will and no close relatives .......

We have a strong contender for the record....! Wow, thanks for making me feel better about my 9 months (typical human gestation period, rightly put @FTB_Help - incidentally, my sister fell pregnant in March!!)

phoebe1989seb

We've been incredibly fortunate with our several sales/purchases....

Sales - I think the longest from offer accepted to completion (on the sale of our last house in 2017/8) was 14 weeks.

The worst for us was when buying a new (to us) home back in 1997. The property was a Victorian house that had been converted to several flats decades previously. All but two of the tenants left voluntarily before our offer was accepted (it was a private sale, so no marketing), but the remaining two had to be evicted.

Iirc, the whole process from offer accepted to completion took around eight months during which time our sale completed and we had to move in with my parents for six weeks. It could have been a lot worse but at the time it felt endless. However it was worth it for what was then our dream renovation project/home 

AskAsk

longest for us was 4.5 months as the buyer lost the house they wanted to buy a month into the process and had to find another one before they could proceed with the sale.  they said they will post letters through the letterbox in the area where they want to move to, and we thought they wouldn't be able find a house this way, but luckily they did.

from experience, a transaction takes just over 3 months to complete.

Cheery_Daff

We moved a couple of years ago - 8 months from offer on ours to completion. Who was responsible? I can tell you in detail as I kept a Spreadsheet of Blame, setting out exactly whose fault it was that we had not moved house each day  

Our solicitor - 12 days (pretty good!!)
Seller - 16 days (waiting for a response to a question which their solicitor never asked them)
Us - 27 days (pulling out of one house right at the start & finding another, waiting for proof of my payrise)
Broker - 23 days (incompetent ****, most USELESS person I have ever met, can't say enough bad things about him)
Buyer - 28 days (we accepted their offer before they'd sold, then later their buyer pulled out so they had to sell again)
Lender - 41 days (offered much less than DIP, then valued at £0, then wouldn't accept my pay rise, then wouldn't lend because house had 11 acres of land rather than 10, blah blah)
Bottom of chain - 76 days (not really fair - they joined the chain after everyone else had finished everything else so had to catch up)

Highly recommend the spreadsheet of blame Between the broker and the building society I nearly lost my mind (sold our house early July, didn't get mortgage offer til October), then bottom of the chain waited til the day after everyone else had signed the paperwork to reduce their offer by £11k - and right got told to f*ck off. 

Never moving house again!!

firsttimesellerldn

Quite liking the spreadsheet of blame idea! I’m currently five months on from putting my place on the market, and since the first sale fell through we’re back to having viewings again. It’s leasehold so even if we get an offer now I reckon it’ll be another 2/3 months till we get there. It’s been much more stressful than I anticipated.. so far delays caused by: our very slow mortgage broker (eventually dumped and went else where); our buyer’s mortgage taking a couple of months; and what did our sale in..our local council getting cyber attacked and not being able to return any searches and our buyer not being willing to use an indemnity. It’s been fun 😂