likely rough timeframe for chain free to complete?

Slinky · 28 February at 9:11PM

Our purchase of a probate completed cash purchase took 5.5 months because the vendors took so long to clear the house out.

EssexHebridean · 1 March at 8:52AM

Bigphil1474 said:

You aren't chain free - there are 3 parties in the chain - your buyer, you, your vendors. You have a simple chain, but it's still a chain. We had similar with one extra link (our FT buyer, us, our vendor, and their vendor selling an empty property). It took 5 months from the chain being complete until completion of sale, although we did have some issues with solicitors unnecessarily slowing things down. 4 -5 months would be my expectation, although clearly it can be done quicker.

Ours was the same length as this and went through in 14 weeks from offers being accepted on our section which was pretty decent. That included a leasehold property at the bottom with a not massively helpful freeholder as well. Handily it also included the fact that our solicitor was my boss which speeded things up somewhat in a few places!

whizzywoo · 1 March at 3:43PM

Our house sold and completed very quickly.
Offer accepted on 29th January 2025.
Exchange and completion went ahead on 18th February 2025.
BUT our buyer had cash in the bank and nothing to sell. They didn't want to wait for the searches as they wanted to move quickly.
We had already moved out several months earlier.

Prior to this happening we had 3 aborted sales. The last one was due to exchange and completed in early December but the buyer had a heart attack two days earlier and was in hospital and no one could contact him. He decided he couldn't complete due to health reasons.

So after 12 months from it being put up for sale it eventually sold extremely quickly. But I think it's quite unusual for searches not to be carried out.