How long is too long? Vendors haven't found a property

jenni_fer

The market is so incredibly broken. It used to be that you could view stuff pre having yours sold so a chain could generally fall into place quite quickly. At the moment, here at least, you can't view anything until you are under offer and then there is generally a 3 week wait to a viewing day..assuming any of the handful of properties around are even vaguely suitable. As such you are stuck waiting around.

Our buyers, and their buyers, haven't instructed solicitors etc until the chain completes. We have found somewhere but they need to find their onward purchase so we're still waiting. At the moment the FTB have been waiting since Oct, our buyers since Jan and us for about 3 weeks. I'd hate to be a poor FTB buyer in this climate but the situation is likely to be the same in any new chain so pulling out is not really that helpful for most.

You will see a lot of suggestions people should rent. But for most it just doesn't make sense to,the whole chain is in a similar position and really all it needs is some honesty and patience.
Oh, and a complete reform of the housing market in England and Wales!

ShilvaA

We were in a very similar position. Our vendors hadn’t found an onward purchase and they can’t go into rental.

We got our offer accepted in January, survey done, searches done, mortgage offer in early Feb... runs out in early August. We cannot extend our mortgage offer and the offer was based on a staggeringly brutal amount of overtime I did to bolster our income for borrowing purposes. 

The overtime has now dried up (always does around the time of year) and If we don’t complete before our mortgage offer expires then we will almost certainly not be able to borrow enough for the house. The vendors don’t know we have any sort of time limit.

Thankfully we got a call today that they finally had an offer accepted.. and it’s on an empty house with no onward chain! 

Keep looking at Rightmove etc, and keep asking for updates through the estate agents. I was emailing them every Tuesday like clockwork, the EA was great in letting us know whether the vendors had any viewings lined up and if they had offered on anything etc.
So we were somewhat confident that they actively searching and viewing. If they were just waiting for something to fall into their laps then we would have abandoned ship by the end of this month so we still had time to try to complete on something else.

It’s a real emotional rollercoaster, and I completely understand and relate to the stress you are under. 

5 months is still enough time, I would give it probably about 4 more weeks before really hitting the panic button.