Conveyancing - why cant it be done in 1-2 weeks?

Conveyancing - why cant it be done in 1-2 weeks?

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fridaypassion

Original Poster:

8,565 posts

228 months

Saturday 4th March 2017
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I'm sure over the years most of us will have experience of this. We are mid move at the moment having had our sale side fall through we are up and running on attempt 2. On the purchase side we pressed on and have now signed our contracts but not exchanged of course. During the conversation (about 10 days ago now) our solicitor went wide eyed at the prospect of having things sorted by the end of March. Why!?

As far as I understand it this is the basic process of making a house purchase:

Memorandum of sale and instruction from client
Mortgage offer in principle
Searches (all online and available instantly)
Survey
Mortgage offer
Queries on deeds
Exchange
Complete

Why can this not be done in 2 weeks?

fridaypassion

Original Poster:

8,565 posts

228 months

Saturday 4th March 2017
quotequote all
We had all our searches back 10 days after instructing the colicitors or at least that what we were told.

fridaypassion

Original Poster:

8,565 posts

228 months

Sunday 28th May 2017
quotequote all
Well a bit of an update to this saga we finally got moved a couple of weeks ago some 4 months after selling.

The second attempt at selling also fell through but we managed it on attempt 3!

The solicitors drove us to the point of absolute distraction throughout! They came up with a couple of covenant "issues" (I think they make most of their income on selling insurance policies for these restrictive covenant things) £160 for a policy to protect us in case a woman that died 25 years ago sues us for having a commercial vehicle on the drive?

So in short we had a needlessly protracted first attempt where the buyers backed out
Second set of buyers were lovely people but wasted 4 weeks of our live trying to sell their house which had 2 missing mineshafts in the garden. They lost their buyer and we found out they had previously had a failed sale last year for the same reason.
Buyer 3 came through but the amount of bullying/harassing/loosing rag with we had to do with the solicitors beggared belief. At every step of the process they just delayed things with no justification. To add the icing on the cake they forgot to get us to re sign fresh deed transfer documents so we had to rush into the office on the day before completion to sign!

Its safe to say we have no plans to move again any time soon biggrin

fridaypassion

Original Poster:

8,565 posts

228 months

Monday 29th May 2017
quotequote all
Thats interesting I wasnt aware of that. Reinforces the idea that they really do just spin the process out !