#conveyancing

Conveyancing

The catharsis that goes with just letting it all out helps, a lot. After reading back that last post, it occurred to me that I didn’t convey how much more stressful this move is, nor why. So here’s another longish read. Enjoy, or just scroll on by if it doesn’t float your boat.

Sure, there are the highs and lows of thinking you’ve cracked the finance and then getting turned down. And yes, we face a new week of nerve-shredding waiting while unseen actuaries and underwriters determine whether we’re a safe lending risk. Truth is, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

All the while, the clock is ticking. Our buyers, we think, are secure. They’ve waited for several years for us to bring our place to market and they’ve picked it off at a sharp price. It doesn’t stop with them though.

The English conveyancing system is dismal. There’s a chain (albeit short) of transactions below them. We know that their buyer switched tracks after our buyer offered on our place. Prior to that, they’d been in a chain that had made no progress since June. They and their buyers have been pushing hard for completion before Christmas.

Somewhere along the way, an agent encouraged that switch on the grounds that we could complete swiftly. It might have been useful to talk that over with us before making a commitment on our behalf. We only started marketing in late September, so the three months before that really don’t interest me. But there’s a risk though that someone will throw the toys out of the cart if we don’t make progress, and then the whole chain of transactions collapses.

We’re fairly sure that exchanging contracts will ease the unrest. The trouble is that an exchange relies on agreeing to a completion date. If we do that, and then find the Scottish purchase doesn’t pan out, we’ll make ourselves homeless. We’re also reluctant to incur additional costs in our removal by going into storage just to satisfy someone else further down the chain. Maybe they wouldn’t be so pushy if we ask them to pick up the bill. Then again, maybe they’d walk away.

The Scottish system is far more civilised. An offer becomes binding once formally accepted and each party is exposed to the others’ costs if they pull out without a legally valid reason. It’s because of this that our offer was conditional, and as long as it’s only conditional there’s no obligation on the seller to cease marketing. Although we have a gentleman’s agreement that they’ll suspend viewings at least while we get our ducks in a row, we know there’s another interested party trying to do the same. No pressure then.

We want to exchange, preferably with a completion date set sufficiently far ahead that we can conclude our Scottish purchase at the same time. We don’t want to exchange until we have a clear offer on the finance. We already lost several weeks chasing an abortive proposal, and now we don’t want to appear desperate with the new sources in case that sends the wrong message. We can’t get the ball rolling in Scotland until we achieve both a finance offer and an exchange in England. The longer that waits, the more likely it is the vendor will resume marketing or, worse still, the other interested party beats us to it.

Finally, just to add to the mix, we agreed with our buyers a stage that we’d achieve in the build here. Not knowing how long we have left makes that … interesting. Oh, not to mention that we’re currently stalled because I can’t lay floors until the electrics are inspected and trying to find an electrician who'll do that is proving impossible.

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