Our buyers solicitor was not on the lenders panel

kben

Hi there 
we are looking for some advice as we are struggling to get any concrete information. 

We accepted an offer on our house in February and our buyer shared he wanted to move in in March. We worked towards this date and so did the people we are buying from. 

The day before this move we were told the buyers solicitor was not on the lenders panel so the mortgage was not finalised. 

To be fair the buyer got a new lawyer the next day who was on the panel. This was 3 weeks ago and we are still being told ‘the mortgage is at the final stages’ 

We have shared with our estate agent and the buyers lawyer we are concerned and may need to think about placing it on the market. But we also want to avoid this at all cost. 

Question: After changing solicitor why is it taking so long to finalise? Should we put a deadline on it and think about pulling out? If so how long do we give?

Any advice would be great as we feel so lost! 

user1977

kben said:

We accepted an offer on our house in February and our buyer shared he wanted to move in in March. We worked towards this date and so did the people we are buying from. 

The day before this move we were told the buyers solicitor was not on the lenders panel so the mortgage was not finalised. 

That doesn't sound very plausible - surely there would have been clues that things weren't going to plan well before the supposed completion date? The lender wouldn't even have issued papers to the solicitor if they weren't on the panel.

What is your solicitor saying?

kben

So I guess what they are saying is that the previous lawyer was on a panel of 3 and this lender requires 4, however did not make this clear until we got closer to moving in? 

user1977

kben said:

So I guess what they are saying is that the previous lawyer was on a panel of 3 and this lender requires 4, however did not make this clear until we got closer to moving in? 

Surely your own solicitor knew things weren't progressing? Or had the purchasers' solicitors been dealing with everything and just assuming the mortgage offer would turn up at the last minute?

kben

user1977 said:

kben said:

So I guess what they are saying is that the previous lawyer was on a panel of 3 and this lender requires 4, however did not make this clear until we got closer to moving in? 

Surely your own solicitor knew things weren't progressing? Or had the purchasers' solicitors been dealing with everything and just assuming the mortgage offer would turn up at the last minute?

Well we were having issues with the People we were buying from. They were in the middle of a separation so the sale of the house could not conclude until that was finalised. 

I think our lawyer was chasing that initially ( it was resolved by them creating a separate agreement on the sale of their house) . This took about three weeks as well. The lawyer said he did not want to chase our buyers u til everything was inline. Then when he did start asking a few weeks before the proposed move in date he just kept getting  The papers are coming to oh actually we can’t process the sale! 

So it moved to another lawyer but it feels like we are getting the same thing. The papers are coming. 

Our lawyer just keeps sayings it’s upto you if you want to pull , but we are not sure if this is normal to take longer after changing lawyers or if they are stringing us along