The flawed process of moving house

[Adam]

Wow what a painful process this is.

I accepted the first offer on my house in April. They pulled out and I was quickly able to find another buyer in May. My offer was also accepted in May.

Fast forward to today, just a few days away from exchange and the person at the top of the chain has simply changed their mind and no longer wants to sell. All of the time, effort and money (most important to me) that has been wasted throughout the chain because someone changed their mind. I estimate I am nearly £1k out of pocket with nothing to show for it.

My only option at this point in time is to try and find a short term rental property for my family and push my sale through. I'll look at some houses in the mean time and hopefully find something in due course, right now there doesn't seem to be anything suitable. I certainly don't want to lose my buyer and go through this process again so it seems best to suffer in the short term, regroup, save some more money and start all over again.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this happen to, but what a terrible process this is from start to finish!

 

[Adam]

Thanks for the comments everyone, I had a mope around yesterday morning but back on track to getting things back to normal for my family. My buyer has been fantastic, she has agreed to give me until early August to find somewhere (she will be incurring additional expenses in terms of storage etc) so I'll leave a nice bottle of wine for her when she does move in.

This leaves me with the task of doing 2 moves but it can't be helped. In some ways it's good as we are moving to a new town (less than 10 miles away) which is further from work and would be quite different to where I live now. If we don't enjoy the area we can focus our efforts elsewhere.

I've got to say, I'm just as guilty of this as the story in the OP. We saw a house which ticked all the boxes, but we didn't quite have the "heart" for it but decided to go for it anyway. We got our offer accepted on the Friday, but pulled out on Monday. After the weekend our hearts just weren't in it, even though it seemed right.

And I don't regret it, we now have the perfect house. So in that respect, I'm kind of glad that the system is like it is in England. I withdrew my offer quickly though, so no real harm was done to either party.

To be fair, that would be an annoyance but at least you didn't get to the stage where people have paid money out etc. A reasonably price house should sell in this market (I can attribute to this as I can't find anywhere!) so hopefully they can find another buyer and you can find something more suitable.