Why is it I taking so long! Sorry bit of a rant!

Just noticed my typo - think I'm like the policeman in Allo Allo, haha. Should be post of course, and also, of course, telephone only has one h, and moved one d! Aaagh! I think moving house has fried my brain.

Well done Sandra.. morning everyone
We have just had an 18 point meaningless set of questions and demands from our solicitor for FENSA docs and completion Certs from the gas board. Bits of paper we never thought we would need again within the guarantee period. Over the weekend we ransacked the house, unpacked all the stuff we have packed to find documents we thought we may have thrown away. We found almost all the ones we HAD to provide. Perhaps we will give them an ultimatum...it's taking the Proverbials now. We started all this in November....
All I have to keep me going is that we want the bungalow so badly it 'has' to be worth it....?
Lesson learned..keep everything from this house move and any further improvements/ alterations in the same place!

My sorry saga is now 2 weeks short of 3 months. I have had ONE communication from my buyers Solicitor in the past THREE weeks. They wanted to know what, if anything, we had done about the planning permission we applied for THREE YEARS AGO.
Re. the FENSA certificate. We told them the business had shut down.
I would love to tell them: forget it, take it off the books as I have done in the past with 2 other properties, but unfortunately I'm not in the same financial situation.
We could pull everything in and get a small mortgage but I don't want to be in that situation at my age.

Just shows you. In ANOTHER call to our Estate Agent this morning we told them in no uncertain terms how fed up we were, and we only had to raise a mortgage of £50,000 and we would let our flat out.
Here we are at the end of the day and we have been told that contracts have gone off to our buyer to sign.

Hope to exchange Tuesday and move 1/5/14 fingers crossed

petra I'm assuming the contracts were already with your buyers Solicitor and they have now sent them to the buyer to sign? I worked in conveyancing for going on 30 years and the only reason things were delayed were because either the other solicitors were slow, in which case I would ring and make a nuisance of myself, or because a buyer was having problems getting a mortgage. Things do get shown up in pre contract enquiries, local searches and the like, but these days it is all done electronically so you don't have to wait 2 weeks for a council to send results of a local search.

Regarding registering a title with the Land Registry - it used to be common practice that once a purchase had been completed, the file would be left in a pile of other completed purchase files until someone had time to do the registration. I used to schedule time at the end of Friday afternoon to get them done - Friday mornings were usually manic with completions - but I have known some solicitors leave them for quite a long time.

Hello Sunseeker. Last Tuesday we were going to exchange.
I got a call from my Solicitor saying that: my buyers mortgage lender wanted the planning certificate for when this building was turned into flats.
My head went into freeze mode, I asked him what this meant. He said this would be a ' historical' document as it was made in 1987.
I asked him, "what happens now" He said, in a very condescending voice, " well, I have to apply for it" I asked how long it took. He said he didn't know as he had never done it before!!!!
As you can imagine I was in bits all day. At one point I was so bad that I couldn't hold a cup of tea.
Next day, I thought, right, I'm phoning the council and asking them how long it takes to get this document.
I got through to a lovely lady and told her my tale of woe. She was shocked that we had got to exchange of contracts and this hadn't come up.
She told me they work on a 20 DAY turnaround.
I could have wept (again) Can you believe, she felt so sorry for me that she sent me the document, by email there and then.
I sent this to my Solicitor and my buyers Solicitor.
I have been told that we are still waiting for an answer from my buyers mortgage lender.

These sound like delaying tactics to me. The buyers solicitors should have been able to anticipate the mortgage lenders would want to see a copy of the planning certificate for converting the property into flats.

Contracts are not exchanged until the buyer has a definite unconditional mortgage offer so I don't know why they thought the exchange could take place last Tuesday if they had not passed all requested documents to the mortgage company.

Have you spoken to your buyers direct or are you just leaving it to solicitors? They may be feeling as frustrated as you. If you have contact details for them have a word, perhaps with you both applying pressure something may get done, but don't give them any indication that you are desperate - some buyers use that as an excuse to renegotiate the price!

Buying and selling a house is one of the most stressful things you can do and I'm afraid some solicitors don't make it any easier - if your solicitor is difficult to get hold of (and he/she sounds like a condescending p***k, getting a copy of a planning certificate is pretty standard stuff) then ask to speak to his secretary. She/he may be more forthcoming. I often received calls from clients asking me to explain what my boss had just told them!

Sunseeker. The delaying tack ticks have been worrying us for some time.
We have always known that she is buying our flat ( on buy to let) for her son.
When he finishes uni he will live there and take over the mortgage ( from her)
So you see, there is no rush for her!!! Although last week when I got the bombshell about the planning certificate i told my Solicitor to stop everything, I'd had enough. I had the son on the phone, in tears pleading with me to hang on. Then she was on the phone telling me she was doing all she can.
She's a bit dippy, though. When she phones it's all: oh hello Geraldine, how are you blah blah.
The other problem is, round our way property is going like hot cakes. On the first two bungalows we looked at we were gazumped by £5,000 just like that.

We have moved 12 times in 20 years, I think I have seen it all now.

Firstly - it's usually the solicitors holding things up. They are seriously overworked. If someone goes on holiday, all work is passed to someone else - who doesn't touch it because they don't have time. Use a conveyancer instead, it's what they do all the time, Houses. Nothing else. they have seen it all. We only found that out for the last two moves and it made a world of difference. I even sent mine chocolates!

Delaying tactics - we were trying to get into a house before the start of term. Our solicitor said he thought that he was being put off, fobbed off by the seller's prospective purchase's solicitor.

Our seller did a bit of detective work and discovered that the two actually worked for the same company in the same building - both blissfully unaware, one trying to delay the purchase and the other trying to speed it up. We threatened to pull out. They got moving.

It's so stressful. The man who we bought this house from lost his temper with the people he was buying from and had a heart attack. Which delayed us by three months!

It has taken my eldest son and his wife nearly eight months to buy the house they have been renting for five years. There is no chain involved.
The excuse was that the ex-husband of the woman who owned it still had his name on the deeds. The mortgage offer has run out twice and had to be applied for again.
My daughter in law is now on beta blockers for a heart problem caused by stress, so she cannot have life insurance to cover the mortgage yet.
The purchase should be through 1st May.
Over 45 years we bought ten houses and never had this much trouble.

That's the other worry I have. My oh has high blood pressure, and his only release in all this is to rant an rave.
I know this sounds awful, and only people who have been through it will understand. I have evil thoughts about what I would like to do to these people.

petra is your property still on the market i.e. is the agent still advertising it? My DH and I used to buy and sell property and when one transaction was taking longer than promised we told the buyers solicitors that if contracts were not exchanged by a certain date we were instructing the agents to actively market the property - contracts were exchanged within 10 days! In theory the agent should market the property until contracts are exchanged but in practice they tend not to. If properties are selling quickly in your area this threat may just work.

Don't let your solicitor intimidate you - you are paying him to work for you and he should treat you with respect, is he a partner of the practice? If you don't understand something he tells you, ask him to explain - after all if you knew everything about buying and selling property you wouldn't need to use his services.

Hi Sunseeker. Our Estate put a sold sign up about a month into the sale.
This started late Dec. 2013. We started negotiations on 9 Jan 2014.
They put a sold sign up after a month. I realise now ( with hind site ) this was stupid, but I thought that all would go quickly as the buyer had a large deposit to put down ( from an inheritance )
The estate agent is another problem. My oh hates him. The EA seems to think that everything is ok. You know the sort ....... " oh these things happen"
"There's always little hiccups"

This all sounds so familiar...... All my chickens are roaming free at the moment, dont plan to count them til the exchange is done...things did get a move on and advice given to get the buyers solicitor moving by threatening to cancel the sale and the EA lose their commission and who would be to blame if the buyers lost their sale, as house prices for properties like mine in the past 5 months have gone up £30-40k!

Fingers crossed. For everyone else..xx xx. xx xx

petra if you OH doesn't want to speak to the estate agent, you tell them that you want the property actively marketed, if he gives you the BS about "these things happen" threaten to put the property with another agent who will - that should get his attention.

We found giving the estate agents deadlines, on which date(s) we threatened we would definitely pull out, tended to get things moving. They are far more frightened of things going belly up as they lose their commission, whereas the solicitor will still get their money, or a proportion of it, whatever happens.

We also found it was mostly solicitors delaying things. Ours made a fuss about getting copies of planning permission/building regs for a kitchen "extension" that was actually an internal knock through into an old outdoor toilet/coal hole, years old, and a garage that predated our sellers, who had been here 7 years. I checked the current planning law myself and discovered that, even if there was no planning permission, the Council could do nothing as these were old works. However, on receiving the pre-registration documents last week from the sellers'solicitors, we discovered planning permission, 30 years old, for the garage and plans for the kitchen from 1979, all of which had been available all along if anyone had cared to look for them! But no, why would they do that? Far better to write to each other (by post, of course, not email) and suggest contacting the Council to see if these permissions existed!!!

No wonder they charge so much. They spend far too much of their expensive time wasting it!!

GrandMaSandra. I got the planning permission from the council. My oh was furious. He said why should you be doing the Solicitors job. I know he's right, but my attitude is, if nobody gets off their arse then nothing gets done.
On Tuesday 17 April I told them that's it. I head enough.
Would you believe their attitude was: oh we'll, if that's what you want, so be it. Business is that good round here.
I live to fight another day tomorrow. The lazy b..........s are back in their offices. I couldn't bring myself to say, back to work.

Petra, I'm sure your oh is right, but I'm like you, I'd be doing things myself just to get things moving. I used to work for solicitors many years ago and today's standards would have been totally unacceptable then.

Last week we received a letter from our solicitors containing confirmation of registration for our new house. It had been sent to our old address, the house they had sold for us. Did they not know we've moved? Despite two requests we still haven't received a receipted invoice from either the solicitors or the estate agents, despite letting them have the money over a month before completion. Really poor service in general I think!

I used to think of it as almost a full-time job. I would spend a couple of hours a day on the phone at least - I had to, because we always needed to have moved over a school holiday. Even then, we ended up renting a few times because sales fell through. We lost buyers a couple of times because our solicitors were too slow. I found new solicitors/went to conveyancers instead.

The ONLY good estate agents I ever had were in Winchester. They took a lot of the work away from me. I discovered later that they had all been sent to America to train. They really did chase everyone up, all along the chain. Mind you, that move was so awkward that we were probably the reason why the poor girl who dealt with us took a year off straight afterwards.

I would like to say a big thank you to everyone sharing their stories. At least I didn't feel alone! We move tomorrow and not a day too soon. I threw all my toys out of my pram and someone decided to put them back!
I will probably feel exhausted this time tomorrow, currently I feel like tomorrow's Christmas and can't get here quickly enough..

That's terrific Ashmore best wishes for tomorrow

I really feel sorry for those suffering this stressful situation.

When We moved up North about 26yrs ago we were buying a new house still at the first floor stage.
After several weeks it was discovered that our solicitor had heard nothing about our proposed buy.
Hubby was working up here and I was in London with the kids.
A lot of phone calls from me to the London based property company, finally revealed that when Hubby went into the sales office on a Friday afternoon to put our offer in, and pay the deposit, the woman in the sales office had put our paper work and that of another would be buyer into the drawer, gone home early for the weekend and had forgotten all about this offer.
It was only when I contacted the company head office and they began to investigate. To be fair, the company was very helpful and I was even called by them on a Saturday to explain and apologise.

The quickest sale and purchase we ever had took 6 weeks for the conveyancing.
The couple we were buying from used her brother who was a solicitor to do the work.
It went like magic.

Well one week on and we are nearly sorted.....now to tweak what we have! No rush....