How long would you wait before considering pulling out of a sale?

jez9999

Well, looks like the decision might be taken out of my hands anyway. Vendor's looking at pulling out by the end of the week if exchange date can't get set, so they're as fed up as me. And I don't think there's a single thing I could've done to prevent the situation. Ugh, I HATE the English system.

Chief_of_Staffy

There's no reason for it to take that long unless there are specified and valid concerns. Either one or more solicitor is incompetent; more likely they're simply prioritising better paying jobs.

My sale / purchase at the end of last year took 11 weeks, with the purchase part being 8 weeks. A fortnight of that was waiting for my buyer to complete 'work commitments' (i.e. go on holiday) so it was ready to complete after 9 weeks. And indeed some of that was wasted time, such as the repeated chains of emails from buyer's solicitor —> my solicitor —> me wanting indemnity insurance for the 'unadopted' road, then me telling them the road's been adopted for 25 years and sending the evidence which was a 20 second check of the publicly available records —> my solicitor —> buyer's solicitor… before it came back round again… and again for a third time.

jez9999

For the record, the chain fell through in the end. Vendor pulled out. Huge delay was caused by someone else lower in my chain getting a garage conversion without the proper paperwork and taking forever to get it. A case study in why late discovery is an atrocious system.

mlz1413

Sorry to hear that. As said before pulling out of any chain means starting again. But if someone lower than you in the chain decided to do that then you don't have any choice in the matter.

Regards the roads being adopted by the council, in my estate (10 years old) the builders could prove they had done everything, but the council doesn't want the responsibility. I can see the councils point, so many housing estates are built every year and having to upkeep play ground equipment,l plus roads and verges would be time and money consuming.

But solicitors probably want to sell some insurance indemnity policy.

Good luck for the future