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Are you saying they should hang on indefinitely?! What if it takes them four months to get a buyer? If the process is well underway, people's mortgage offers expire usually after around 6 months. The whole chain (mine was around 5 or 6 links) would be sitting twiddling their thumbs. Not everyone moves on a whim. Many move for a reason - get kids in a certain school, new job, someone needing care, etc and I would be very surprised to hear the whole chain is happy to just sit around and wait. Someone is bound to NEED to start again.
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There's a pretty large amount of ocean between "immediately putting the house back on the market" and "hanging on indefinitely", don't you think? Of course I'm not saying the latter. What if they get a new buyer in two weeks?
Binning your buyer and moving to another one is not necessarily going to save you that much time. You're just going from one crap-shoot to another, unless you get a chain-free buyer. And even then they might mess you around. And by putting the house back on the market, you're risking the buyer you do have getting annoyed and not coming back to you when they are proceedable.
If speed is a motivating factor, starting from scratch is a cracking way to slow things down.
On the mortgage offer point, I've used the "my mortgage offer is expiring" line to try and speed things up as well, but really they can often be extended or renewed pretty easily.
My house purchase was a complex chain and took eight months. I'd rather it hadn't, but it did (through no fault of mine, to be clear). We renewed our mortgage offer during that time. It was
annoying fury-inducing beyond all comprehension, but everyone in the chain wanted the houses they were trying to buy. (We also ended up with a better mortgage rate than we'd originally had, but that's by the by.)