Vendors stringing us along

AdrianC

peterhjohnson said:

MaryNB said:

It sounds like they looked into alternative accommodation and decided it wasn't worth the effort, 

I do wonder if there is a business opportunity for someone offering  a flexible 3 months - 1 year rental of "standard" 3 bed semis targeted at this nice market. Possibly even furnished with a linked storage service for the movers own furniture?

Right up to the point that it goes pear-shaped and somebody refuses to move out...

B'sides, how many houses would be needed to cover all locations around the country?

How much more would they have to be charged out at to make it worth the hassle over just renting them out on standard ASTs?

Niv

peterhjohnson said:

MaryNB said:

It sounds like they looked into alternative accommodation and decided it wasn't worth the effort, 

I do wonder if there is a business opportunity for someone offering  a flexible 3 months - 1 year rental of "standard" 3 bed semis targeted at this nice market. Possibly even furnished with a linked storage service for the movers own furniture?

There already is a solution: sort your own storage and get an air bnb.

teachfast

You could knock on their door and politely ask what's going on rather than use incompetent pseudo professionals as a proxy. Probably bad manners but completely legal and very direct. You know where they live, after all.

r_evans193

teachfast said:

You could knock on their door and politely ask what's going on rather than use incompetent pseudo professionals as a proxy. Probably bad manners but completely legal and very direct. You know where they live, after all.

I’m very close to this!! But a few weeks ago a friend and I were driving past the house so we stopped so she could see it and the vendors were at the window and were very disturbed by us being there for 30 seconds lmao so maybe not. 

r_evans193

Re rented accommodation - the alternative accommodation is a relatives house so they don’t even need to bother finding a rented place! Bear in mind they told us this from the outset too. Some other things have happened during the process that make me suspect they are pretty unreasonable / inflexible people so I’m not holding my breath. Just annoying as it really is the ideal house for us in the location we want to be in - nothing has come up in the last 4 months in that area that we’ve seen that would be suitable in our price range.

r_evans193

Another update! So apparently the reason for the hold up is that they were looking into ‘dates and costs of self storage to see if living with a relative could be possible’. For 6 weeks. Not like they’ve told us from the start that they would be happy to do that.

The current owner of the place that our vendors are buying hasn’t yet found anywhere to live one month in to their buying process. So not a chain like the agent originally told us but still not a great place to be. Apparently our vendor is ‘annoyed’ that he is the one to have to break the chain by moving in with a relative and paying out for storage, when he believes that their vendors ‘are the ones holding things up’. Conveniently forgetting that it took him 2 months to find somewhere to buy and then proceeded to hold us up for weeks because of his onward purchase. You couldn’t make it up with this guy!

They asked for end of July / beginning of August ‘if they -could- move in with a relative’ which we have said fine but they need to give us actual dates so we can move forward. Nothing again so I’ll be calling up our solicitor and the agent on Monday to say we need a firm exchange and completion date from them by the end of next week. Then if we get nothing, we’ll have to give them an ultimatum 😬

Any reasonable person would see that for the cost of self storage for a couple of months, it’s worth not losing buyers who bought during a house price bubble. Let alone that we had an electrical report done which stated the electrics were 50+ years old and completely unsafe, which presumably would have to be declared to any future buyers. But as we can see this guy is not reasonable. 

We are now sadly prepared to lose the house if the alternative is waiting around for months on end - who knows how long it will take their vendor to find somewhere, could be in a chain etc. And of course all the while dealing with this unreasonable vendor - who knows what else might come up.

deannagone

What about agreeing to pay a contribution to help with their storage costs?  Got to be less than throwing money spent on legal fees down the drain - for a house you can't easily find an alternative for at this time.  On condition of a firm exchange date.  If his vendor hasn't found a place to buy yet, he could be waiting a long while to complete his chain.  

I'd work on reducing the negative feelings that seem to be appearing in both you and your vendor.  They won't help..  

Or back out completely and try next year.

r_evans193

deannagone said:

What about agreeing to pay a contribution to help with their storage costs?  Got to be less than throwing money spent on legal fees down the drain - for a house you can't easily find an alternative for at this time.  On condition of a firm exchange date.  If his vendor hasn't found a place to buy yet, he could be waiting a long while to complete his chain.  

I'd work on reducing the negative feelings that seem to be appearing in both you and your vendor.  They won't help..  

Or back out completely and try next year.

We’re reluctant to do this. I know what you mean about trying to reduce the negative feelings to make a clearer decision but I just don’t think the onus should be on us to pay out for their storage costs when it’s something they’ve said from the beginning that they would be happy to do - the house was sold to us as basically chain free as they had a relatives house to move to. And now nearly 4 months later they’re quibbling about storage costs?

We’ve conceded several times throughout the process on things that would have been cutting off our noses to spite our faces and been very reasonable throughout, but this would be a step too far for me. We have the weekend to have a breather and think about it, but ultimately our experience of this vendor makes me think that even if we offered a contribution, something else would crop up that we would be once again expected to concede on and there comes a point where you have to put your foot down.

I know what you’re saying as we would lose fees etc, but the fees we’ve paid are equivalent to a couple of months rent to us so it wouldn’t be such a big loss vs potentially waiting around for goodness knows how long - both financially and mentally.