FTB: some advice on waiting for vendor due to chain break

SpiderLegs

lookstraightahead said:

SpiderLegs said:

lookstraightahead said:

SpiderLegs said:

Heardy92 said:

Hi guys

Long story short I'm a FTB who had an offer accepted June of this year and after an already long, emotional process (and generally just hoping I'd be moved this side of Xmas) have found out today that the chain ahead of our vendor has fallen through. I'm still waiting to hear from the EA on the vendors appetite to rent, but was wondering how common it is for a buyer to negotiate a reduced price based on willingness to tread water while vendor starts a new purchase from scratch. I'd fallen in love with the flat I had hoped I'd shortly be moving into, however on the flip side I'm paying rent while I wait and my partner had been waiting for us to move to find a new job as she's a retail manager.

Just some generally words of advice would be really welcome as I'm quite rocked by all this.thanks in advance 

I’m a bit confused. You don’t like the idea of having to continue paying rent, but then expect the vendor to have to go do exactly that?

Or you’re going to gazunder them?

Now if I was the vendor and had just had my chain collapse I wouldn’t be in a particularly good mood. If my buyer then came knocking on the door saying I had to drop the price or have a load of hassle and extra cost of breaking the chain, I might have a few choice words to say about those particular options…

I see it the opposite way around. The vendor is the one wanting to sell, and had put their property on the market wanting to sell.

They have a buyer with no chain, who really wants to buy it. Yet it's costing the buyer more and more to wait around. 

The buyer can simply move on and shop elsewhere, but the vendor only has one product on offer.

I think at the present time it's a bit skewed admittedly because of demand, but vendors need to consider the market slowing down.

of course it's the vendors prerogative to do what they like, it's their house, but surely when people put their houses on the market they actually 'want' to move on with their lives? 

The risk the buyer has is that the vendor will do as you say, and tell them to do one. But if the buyer isn't happy anyway as they're getting nowhere fast, I'm not sure it's a big risk to the buyer. A house is a house. There will be another one around the corner.

I think on balance we can say that there are more potential buyers than available properties at the moment. 
And we can probably also say that that has been the case for the majority of the last thirty years or so, with no realistic expectation that that will change in the medium term.

And I suppose we could also say that the buyer deciding to go find another property may only result in them joining another chain that might also collapse at some point down the line.

And I am guessing that this new property is going to need revised mortgage application and starting again with a new set of surveys and legals.

And at the end of the day, if your view is that this particular buyer can go find something else at the drop of a hat, then presumably the vendor who has collapsed the chain will be picking up another property fairly sharpish as well.

I hear lots and lots of comments about how hard it is for FTB to get on the property ladder, so if that’s the case one would imagine that the OP putting themselves back at the start of that process isn’t the wisest suggestion.

"We"?

I really don't understand where you get the last thirty years from! You're saying they for the past 30 years there has been more demand than supply?

The buyers don't have to join a chain if they don't want to.

The buyers are actually having to start again with these vendors so the mortgage offer will no doubt run out anyway. 

I don't know what you mean by 'realistic expectation in the medium term' unless you have a crystal ball.

Yes over the last thirty years there has consistently been more demand for housing than supply. I don’t think that is in much dispute given what has been happening to house prices.

you are right that the buyers don’t have to buy a house with a chain. Although that would mean finding an unoccupied one or a new build, so not really the largest pool of available stock. 

The buyers are not starting again by any stretch of the imagination. They may need an extension on their mortgage offer (you seem to have ‘no doubt’ about that), but that is not anywhere near starting again.

the realistic expectation is that we will not be building enough new properties to satisfy demand for a significant number of years. No crystal ball is needed for that.