The nervous wait to exchange....

HungryHippos · 23 Sep 2020 at 15:56

Bravetart said:
There are Linden and Bovis on the same development we bought on. Glad we didn't get one from them! Ours is with Bloor, who seem to do pretty well - https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/bloorhomes.com

Yeah I just like to see companies care about reputation a bit, it shows that they can keep reasonable reviews, and fix stuff when people aren't happy.

Bovis and Linden merged to form Vistry btw! Which is equally badly reviewed so far.

I expect snagging issues too but I also expect them to be fixed. I had issues outstanding with Linden that were approaching 2 years old, and no amount of chasing was getting them sorted.

Liquid_Entity · 23 Sep 2020 at 15:58

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh this is doing my head in. Why are the sellers and solicitors so slow and useless. Under serious threat now that we will lose our buyers.

I have received another call from xxxx and also an email from his agent, please see below. Would you be able to find out how many enquiries are outstanding, and when they expect to be able to respond, as it does feel like we are running out of time slightly?

Kind regards

xxx

Hi xxx,

I have spoken to the buyer of the aforementioned property, as well as the buyer of his place at St Leonards Park, and we are ready to proceed to exchange on our side. I am under incredibly heavy pressure from both your buyers, and the buyers below in order to get this through ASAP. I have also had threats to pull out of the purchase at the bottom if we do not have a date agreed for exchange and completion by the end of the day on Friday.

Of course we do not want to lose this chain, so please do everything you can to progress this as quickly as possible. Please do keep me updated!

Dan_P · 23 Sep 2020 at 16:12

Got our Help to Buy authority to exchange through this week, once the solicitor gets responses to queries regarding the management companies, roads being adopted and our query on the boundaries we expect to exchange next week.

We visited the site last week and completed our "meet the site manager" appointment - we have been advised that the house should be ready a week or two before we expected (End of november/early december) which is perfect.

mid_gen · 24 Sep 2020 at 14:59

Got woodworm survey done today, all clear. So everything the surveyor flagged up was false.....sigh.

Agreed a small amount as an allowance to cover the little work that did need doing. Finally all going ahead and hopefully complete by mid October.....

fastwunz · 24 Sep 2020 at 15:20

mid_gen said:
Got woodworm survey done today, all clear. So everything the surveyor flagged up was false.....sigh.

Agreed a small amount as an allowance to cover the little work that did need doing. Finally all going ahead and hopefully complete by mid October.....

And if woodworm had been found you would be over the moon!

Swings and roundabouts

mid_gen · 24 Sep 2020 at 15:37

fastwunz said:
And if woodworm had been found you would be over the moon!

Swings and roundabouts

Woodworm guy said there was 1 or 2 bore holes that on one joist that have probably been there for decades, no evidence of an active infestation at all. So the surveyor's "Evidence of active wood worm infestation" was in fact, false. Worse than useless having a survey where the guy fills it with false negatives, because you don't know which parts of it you can trust.

In the end I didn't trust any of his survey and made my own mind up.

koolpc · 24 Sep 2020 at 16:36

Surveyors are just form fillers.

Nitefly · 24 Sep 2020 at 22:40

Bravetart said:
There are Linden and Bovis on the same development we bought on. Glad we didn't get one from them! Ours is with Bloor, who seem to do pretty well - https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/bloorhomes.com

Meh, the Bloor development I was interested in put a variable estate rent charge in their transfer... put me right off. Hard pass. A certain law firm seriously needs to update their precedents!! If you can take a view on that though, their houses do seem to be pretty nice and their developments tend to be well spaced out.

Bopped in an offer on a house today... 4 people put in offers so have had to go well over asking, hurrrrhhn

DampCat · 25 Sep 2020 at 07:34

We had 4 viewings on our house on Tuesday, and just out of pure nosiness we decided to take a look at who might be our buyers by popping onto our nest cam. Glad we did, because for almost an hour the guy "doing the viewings" didn't get out of his car, just left the door open and let perfect strangers wander around our house unaccompanied.

It would have been over an hour I'm sure, that's just how long it took us to get to the agents store and uh... Provide feedback for the current situation.

Stovehead · 25 Sep 2020 at 08:40

Junglist · 25 Sep 2020 at 09:06

Annoyingly our NHBC sign off wasn't able to be completed this week due to the house being built nearby still has scaffolding up. They said they're hoping it should be the middle of next week now

The wait goes on

happy_2008 · 25 Sep 2020 at 09:36

So our buyers have kinda gone unresponsive to our EA which is fustrating

Mr Jack · 25 Sep 2020 at 09:43

Stovehead said:
Estate agents are scumbags. I put them on a par with “chuggers”.

Nah, at least chuggers are doing it in a good cause.

Liquid_Entity · 25 Sep 2020 at 12:02

Today is probably the day we find out the buyers are going to pull out. Our solicitor still hasn't received all of the answers to the enquiries we asked for 2 weeks ago. Chased yesterday and their solictors said these were new enquiries. LIES LIES LIES !! this whole process is ridiculous. EAs make money for doing nothing and solicitors make money being slow, useless imbeciles.

happy_2008 · 25 Sep 2020 at 12:06

Liquid_Entity said:
Today is probably the day we find out the buyers are going to pull out. Our solicitor still hasn't received all of the answers to the enquiries we asked for 2 weeks ago. Chased yesterday and their solictors said these were new enquiries. LIES LIES LIES !! this whole process is ridiculous. EAs make money for doing nothing and solicitors make money being slow, useless imbeciles.

I feel for you, our buyers have yet to pay there solicitors to open a file but have applied for a mortgage. However, they dont seem to be responding to messages left by my EA whilst my solicitors our progressing quite nicely. Its quite stressful at the moment as we don't know if we need to re-market and start from the beginning again.

Bravetart · 25 Sep 2020 at 12:10

Junglist said:
Annoyingly our NHBC sign off wasn't able to be completed this week due to the house being built nearby still has scaffolding up. They said they're hoping it should be the middle of next week now

The wait goes on

That's really annoying. We were in the same situation but they let us crack on if we signed a waver.

Nitefly said:
Meh, the Bloor development I was interested in put a variable estate rent charge in their transfer... put me right off. Hard pass. A certain law firm seriously needs to update their precedents!! If you can take a view on that though, their houses do seem to be pretty nice and their developments tend to be well spaced out.

Bopped in an offer on a house today... 4 people put in offers so have had to go well over asking, hurrrrhhn

Nothing like that with ours. We have to pay an annual fee to the University of Reading, because I think it was built on green belt land, so the fee is for them finding public green access elsewhere or some such nonsense.

Got to see our house for the first time yesterday and it looks fantastic! They seem to have done a great job on the build, but I guess we will find out when we get in for real

Nomisf · 25 Sep 2020 at 14:23

happy_2008 said:
I feel for you, our buyers have yet to pay there solicitors to open a file but have applied for a mortgage. However, they dont seem to be responding to messages left by my EA whilst my solicitors our progressing quite nicely. Its quite stressful at the moment as we don't know if we need to re-market and start from the beginning again.

I was/am the one on the other end of something similar to this.

I visited my solicitor, they agreed to take on the work - and said they would send paperwork. I then used their details for all my form filling (mortgage, surveyor etc) only to then spend 4 weeks chasing them relentlessly before they even opened the file. By the time they started searches I had the Survey and Mortgage offer in my hand. In those 4 weeks I called and emailed every day, as did the vendors solicitor and estate agent - only to ever be told "yes we are acting for that person, we will get someone to ring you back". They eventually did something after I visited in person to make sure the lights were still on, but now - two weeks later its radio silence all over again and my vendor are livid - its just shame I am too far in to back out and use a different firm.

I don't know if I should laugh, cry or kick the door down - I wonder if your buyers are in the same sort of trap ?

mid_gen · 25 Sep 2020 at 14:41

I don't know how anyone an stomach moving regularly....I feel like I've shaved a few years off my life expectancy these last 9-10 months. Absolute shambles of a system. Couldn't make it more needlessly expensive, stressful, and wasteful if you tried.

happy_2008 · 25 Sep 2020 at 14:47

Nomisf said:
I was/am the one on the other end of something similar to this.

I visited my solicitor, they agreed to take on the work - and said they would send paperwork. I then used their details for all my form filling (mortgage, surveyor etc) only to then spend 4 weeks chasing them relentlessly before they even opened the file. By the time they started searches I had the Survey and Mortgage offer in my hand. In those 4 weeks I called and emailed every day, as did the vendors solicitor and estate agent - only to ever be told "yes we are acting for that person, we will get someone to ring you back". They eventually did something after I visited in person to make sure the lights were still on, but now - two weeks later its radio silence all over again and my vendor are livid - its just shame I am too far in to back out and use a different firm.

I don't know if I should laugh, cry or kick the door down - I wonder if your buyers are in the same sort of trap ?

From my understanding there solicitors are actually quite responsive and have replied to my EA that they were awaiting payment from my buyers to open the case. It seems quite clear the hold up is with my buyers but the whole thing has left me very confused. I could understand if they were not going to make payment until there mortgage is approved but surely you would notify the EA on this. At the moment we're just playing a waiting game.

IvanDobskey · 25 Sep 2020 at 14:56

mid_gen said:
I don't know how anyone an stomach moving regularly....I feel like I've shaved a few years off my life expectancy these last 9-10 months. Absolute shambles of a system. Couldn't make it more needlessly expensive, stressful, and wasteful if you tried.

This is exactly how we felt. Absolute nightmare from start to finish. Don't want to do it again in a hurry.

We had a final punch in the guts of the stamp duty holiday being announced days after we completed.