Is anyone moving now?

[TimmyMallett]

England87 said:

Has anyone put an ultimatum on exchange? E.g exchange by x date or the price goes up £1k a day...

Yes. Our buyer did. All it did was make us think he was a prick so we told him to stop or we would put it back on the market.

Sorry I'm not saying this applies to you but it might help your situation but it might blow off your buyer (maybe a good thing)

[TimmyMallett]

England87 said:

Yep, I keep getting nagged at to pack, but I won’t pack until we get the exchange done.

If you've got no dependents thats admirable but are you sure you couldn't start with stuff you haven't used for 6 months?

I bet you could find stuff. It will help the nagging stop and you get a head start

[Turn7]

I will, officially, be utterly climbing the walls and baying for blood if we havnt exchanged by the end of next week......

[Captain Raymond Holt]

England87 said:

Has anyone put an ultimatum on exchange? E.g exchange by x date

That I agree with

England87 said:

or the price goes up £1k a day...

I’d tell you to fk off.

Or... I’d get you to agree to dropping the price by £2k for every day early.

[Taita]

If everyone paid X hundred more for solicitors fees, would the' stack em high' to make any money approach to cases drop and it wouldn't actually be a complete farce?

Or is the other fact that 99% of people working in the industry are just a bit dim?

[England87]

Taita said:

If everyone paid X hundred more for solicitors fees, would the' stack em high' to make any money approach to cases drop and it wouldn't actually be a complete farce?

Or is the other fact that 99% of people working in the industry are just a bit dim?

We are paying good money for a decent local solicitors and very good local estate agents, not a cheapo call centre type that are encouraged by a well known online agents that rhymes with orange sticks. It appears conveyancing attracts the same type of person that the HR industry does.

[Taita]

England87 said:

Taita said:

If everyone paid X hundred more for solicitors fees, would the' stack em high' to make any money approach to cases drop and it wouldn't actually be a complete farce?

Or is the other fact that 99% of people working in the industry are just a bit dim?

We are paying good money for a decent local solicitors and very good local estate agents, not a cheapo call centre type that are encouraged by a well known online agents that rhymes with orange sticks. It appears conveyancing attracts the same type of person that the HR industry does.

Equally you could have 5000 per hour solicitor and they'd still be beholden waiting for answers or info from the bottom feeder firms I guess

Edited by Taita on Sunday 21st February 08:03

[England87]

Captain Raymond Holt said:

England87 said:

Has anyone put an ultimatum on exchange? E.g exchange by x date

That I agree with

England87 said:

or the price goes up £1k a day...

I’d tell you to fk off.

Or... I’d get you to agree to dropping the price by £2k for every day early.

That’s fair enough, it’s just sheer frustration coming through. Without writing out the full details, our buyers and their buyers should have been ready as we are the last cog in the wheel as we had to wait for our LA searches as the first house we were buying fell through so the two lower in the chain have had a that extra time to be ready. We’ve got everything done on the second house in 6 weeks to find out they’re not ready having been under offer when they offered on ours in October.

[C Lee Farquar]

In the 80 and 90s, pre conveyancing shops, it was still poor.

But, mortgage lenders asked less questions and could deal with issues at local level, no one cared about building regs sign off or Fensa. Indemnity policies were rare. If you wanted to know how old the boiler was you went to the house and asked the vendor. etc. etc.

[AlmostUseful]

Taita said:

Equally you could have 5000 per hour solicitor and they'd still be beholden waiting for answers or info from the bottom feeder firms I guess

Edited by Taita on Sunday 21st February 08:03

That’s where we are, I mean obviously not paying £5k per hour (it’s £4.7k, I’m not stupid )but we’ve got “proper” solicitors that are well respected in town, even our buyer that’s moving here from the Home Counties is using one of our locals so that’s 3 parts of the chain all sorted but the chumps at the bottom have gone with an online sweat shop organisation that are showing themselves to be grossly incompetent.
No amount of money at our end will fix that (which is good, because we couldn’t afford to pay for it so I’d be annoyed if it actually was an option )

[Shnozz]

MrVert said:

We've been going through the ridiculous 'process' with our sale & purchase since 23rd July.

Solicitors have been telling lies about mortgages, dates when things were sent off, then when caught out and proved to be lying, trying to cover it up with more lies.

People not taking calls, not returning emails etc etc...it's almost as if they don't want to actually get paid...utter imbeciles the lot of them.

But, after all this time and the biggest roller coaster I think I've ever been on....we finally completed yesterday....

In the end, we were forced by a single Solicitor in the chain to exchange and complete simultaneously....it was all rather nerve racking having your entire life loaded onto a lorry awaiting 'the call'....

3pm came and went, chased Solicitors for the 4th time, was told our money had come in from the buyer below and they had in turn sent the money to the Solicitor above..but we could not have access until they confirmed receipt.

Sod that, could have been waiting another hour. Went to the new house, guessed where the previous owner had left the keys....and we were in! 10 mins later had the official 'you can access the property now' call..

By 11pm, we had something that almost resembled a home





Converted Barn, up to date Building Regs, insulated heavily, underfloor heating throughout, edge of a village...with two great pubs....Dream Home

I am never, ever moving again...

Looks wonderful. Congrats.

[georgefreeman918]

Anybody got any thoughts on whether the stamp duty holiday will be extended?

We have just accepted an offer on our property and we have found a property we like. The stamp duty will be nearly £10k if there is no extension which is putting us off making them an offer. (We have already made an offer below asking to cover stamp duty, but this was rejected)

Hold off until March 3rd or bite the bullet now?

[AJB88]

Our Buyer came round yesterday to do some measuring, first time I've met him, his partner is the person who owned by house previously to me with her now ex-husband.

[Fast Bug]

fesuvious said:

Extension to end May.
Match up with the inanely stupid H2B finally ending.

I hope this happens, however I'm not banking on it!

[AJB88]

Fast Bug said:

I hope this happens, however I'm not banking on it!

Same here, for me an extension for people with paperwork submitted before March 31st would be fine.

[Mr Whippy]

Fast Bug said:

fesuvious said:

Extension to end May.
Match up with the inanely stupid H2B finally ending.

I hope this happens, however I'm not banking on it!

I read in a report/news article that this was ‘support’ due to covid19 and it might be extended.

I’m baffled how a tax break that has just shifted prices up by the saving, thus giving no one a break or support except banks lending more money, or wealthy off loading excess property at higher prices.


There is no justification for it to go on. I’m not even sure what justification there was for it coming in.

This at a time when public sector is getting pay freezes and private sector job losses and taxes rising, and gov want to give give money to rich people and banks?

Bit weird.

[Flooble]

Having worked with high priced legal advisors I don't think it would make any difference how much was paid by people in the process unless it was possible to apply "time" as a key metric inversely proportional to the way it often works i.e. "you get paid more if you do this in less time". I have been driven nuts by endless iterations of simple contracts where the total (realistic) liability wasn't even as much as most people's houses cost. The younger guys fretted over what word to use while the older and more pragmatic legal guys assured me that except for certain words and phrases, the courts read the sentence the same way as anyone else so the stuff the juniors were wasting time over wouldn't make a jot of difference.

If you give them time to think there's always another question, another "what if" that crops up. Pay more money and they be able to work with fewer clients and have even more time to come up with extra concerns.

This is not entirely the fault of the solicitors; the world feels like it is more litigious now than ever, with "compo face" in the Mail and some people having a sense of entitlement that I don't feel was there 50 years ago. Chancers who will try it on - there are a few of that sort who I have seen post on this site with concepts such as "my three year old Audi has peeling lacquer on the number plate, I demand a brand new car as restitution".

So I can see why the law firms - who have their liability to think about - want everything watertight. Add in that conveyancing is always going to be mostly, for want of a better description, "clerical work" and you are lumbered with the process as it is.

My own tale of joy is an Estate Agent who was dealing with a property for me and forgot, for two months straight, to forward an answer to the buyer. In that case the Solicitors actually saved the day by resolving the issue - that should never have even come up - between themselves and their clients within a few hours.

[Evoluzione]

Evoluzione said:

Evoluzione said:

Our solicitor meanwhile contacts bank to cancel money and they then reveal they might not have lent anyway despite us getting it in writing from them 3 times now. No-one knows why we've had 3 identical mortgage offers through our letterbox over the weeks.

It was discussed with them some time ago that whilst there is some ancient hunting rights on the land, that in actual fact the Lord of the Manor will not break down the front door or let his 12 bore off in the garden. Back then they were happy with this, now they're seeking further clarification and we're offering to pay £250 for an indemnity to cover it.

Nothing happened last week, Barclays are just passing it to one another within their system and saying 'Sorry, not my department'.
Solicitor, us and mortgage broker have all been onto them and they simply don't know what they're doing and won't make a decision over something as stupid as this.
The move date of 22nd will have surely vanished by now, but as per earlier advice we'll be seeking both exchange and completion dates in the future.

Lol, the only good thing to come out of this is it's gone on for so long we've passed a possible Summer completion, to an unwanted Autumn and Winter one, back to a late Winter/early Spring move again.
Why this is positive is our current heating bills are low in comparison (through this harsh Winter) and i'll need to do lots of work to the new place if we eventually move so wouldn't wanted to have sat in it in Winter.

A lot more buggering about, yet zero progress.

Yet another week lost as the bank just don't know what to do.

I had the idea that we should find out who the current LOTM is and contact him, maybe ask him to sign some kind of waiver that he won't come into the house or garden whilst still allowing him to use the land. Sol says it's probably the only way we'll move forward so we have spent time trying to find out who he is and come up with a few leads. The persons named on the deeds are long time gone and kind of famous around these parts. Actually having their own Wiki page and a family member had set up a small website about them. Sadly it's gone, but I found enough fragments of it left on 'Waybackmachine' to get a name.
Whoever it is is unlikely to agree to anything without trying to extort money from us.

Our seller is a bit of a pillock, very stupidly and unprofessionally his Sol (who must be highly sick of him now as everyone else is) gave him our Sols private mobile number! Aside from boring the pants off him for 20 mins airing his views he made himself look even more stupid than ever. When we first found the place he said the LOTM does have a right to hunt and aired it once in a while - on the fields, not on the house and gardens. He then told our sol there was no such thing. Sol then points out it's actually on the deeds! So he's backed himself into a corner with his lies.
I've messaged seller to tell his sol who it is if he knows.

So it's turned out our mortgage advisor shouldn't have taken this job on as it's out of his remit. Smallholdings are for specialist companies and it seems he never knew that. So he's probably out of pocket as he's working for a fixed fee.

If we now go to a specialist broker we'll have lost the money we paid the current one. Will have to pay again, it'll take months to organise so we'll be thousands out of pocket too from the missed opportunity of stamp duty relief. Given the current broker has taken money for a job he can't do i'm wondering if we can't claim it back.

I mentioned all this mess and lost monies to the Sol, he said our fees from them of X amount (insert 4 figures here) would actually have amounted to 3 times that if they'd charged per hour.

So everyone is on a loser.
With what we know now we could have got where we are now without actually paying a broker, the EA has done nothing of any use whatsoever (aside from putting the property on the 'net which is how I found it) apart from make an utter nuisance of themselves. The Sol will be paid for his professional services, but those have included making the bank aware of some meaningless ancient right which has caused the wheels to come off the whole thing.

And we employ these people for their professional services!

So this week:
See if we can find out who the current LOTM is and see if we can approach him somehow (any clues as to how we find him/her?)
Have a meeting with our buyers to discuss how desperate they are to get in. Given we have nothing concrete as ever I don't know how that will go. I've told them in the past that whatever is happening in front of us won't stop us selling to them, if it comes to it we'll move out.

[Taita]

So many stories here seem like they could be resolved with an all hands 30 minute call or meeting instead of passing info around via archaic means and with idiot solicitors?

[Evoluzione]

Taita said:

So many stories here seem like they could be resolved with an all hands 30 minute call or meeting instead of passing info around via archaic means and with idiot solicitors?

Sometimes. In reality a solicitor will only talk to and on behalf of their clients. Client talks to sol, sol talks to other sol, other sol talks to their client. It's not professional or advisable to do it any other way.
EAs will make themselves completely unavailable when you want something from them, but harass you all day when they want something from you.

There is one person in our chain who is an utter nobhead, you would absolutely not want any contact with him whatsoever.