UK

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/...ing-a-home-timeline/

Until It is sold it can collapse at any moment, more so with a chain. The longer the chain the more opportunities for that to happen.

You can get to completion and the buyer can pull out, cut their offer etc

As much as I dislike them, a good estate agent is absolute fucking gold in this situation.

A chain is created when say you have a buyer- but that buyer has to sell their property to get a mort for your property- and it can go deeper that , and recall one time up to 5 sellers/buyers in a chain -with the final sale dependent on a sale 5 deep. A real estate agent is your best friend in UK - and and the commission compared to US and Canada is very very low. perhaps as low as 1.5 %...Good luck

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Graham Wilson
USAT Level III Elite Coach
http://www.thewilsongroup.biz

Lower than that these days. 1% incl VAT.

6% including vat in France. Extortion.

In terms odlf conveyancing, if the solicitor sorting the estate is not doing it, go online. Legal fees should be less than 600 up to 1m

Accepting an offer doesn't really mean anything legally, it's just a matter of trust and how much skin the buyer/seller has in the game as to how firm a commitment it is. The only point at which there is a legal commitment is when you have exchanged contracts. This doesn't happen until the buyer has done their due diligence - a survey, searches to make sure the house has proper planning permission, whether it's on a flood plain, has any loans secured against it, etc. Contracts are then signed and the buyer pays a deposit, typically 10%, which is held by their lawyer. At this point the sale is almost certainly going to go through, unless somebody dies or something else pretty extreme happens. Prior to this point the buyer has had an increasing amount to lose as they will have been paying money for searches, lawyers, surveys, etc, so as the seller you should be getting more comfortable as the process goes on (or wary if there are signs the buyer isn't that committed e.g. they're dragging their feet on getting the survey done, not responding quickly, etc).

As above, a chain means that your buyer needs to sell their house in order to buy yours. The chain can continue - e.g. their buyer may also be selling a house, and so on and so on. Typically when you have a chain then everybody in the chain exchanges contracts on the same day, and completes the sale on the same day. This obviously hugely increases the likelihood of something going wrong, as if any one person in the chain pulls out for whatever reason, the whole thing collapses. I've known this happen to friends on many occasions, luckily never to me!

The best buyer is a cash buyer with no chain who doesn't need a mortgage. The only thing that's going to stop that sale is them changing their mind or finding something unexpected in the due diligence. Next best is a chain free buyer with an approved mortgage. If you have a buyer with a chain then the shorter the better, plus you ideally want them to be under offer themselves already (i.e. they've at least found their own buyer) and have mortgage approved. Your agent (I assume you already have an agent as you have an offer) should be helping you establish the buyer's position. You get some real time wasters e.g. people who put speculative offers in on houses and haven't got theirs on the market yet. You also get some unscrupulous ones who will try and drop the price at the last minute, hoping you'd rather take the hit than start the process over again. This happens more in a falling market where they may feel the house has gone down in value since they put their initial offer in. Reasonable chance that markets will be falling soon - if the Conservatives win the general election next month that means Brexit is happening, if they don't that means either Jeremy Corbyn (socialist who's in favour of taxing wealth and property) becomes PM or we have some messy hung parliament.

If the house happens to be in Scotland then ignore most of the above! They have a different and better system, but I don't know that much about it.

Edit to add. Last three sales and purchases I've made have all had exchange and completion on the same day.

Which is simply terrible when you are selling. I had an offer last Feb. I completed in Sept, exchange was the same day and at any point the buyer could walk.

A quick primer:

Buying and selling property in England, Wales or Northern Ireland (Scotland is completely different) has two stages:

(1) exchange of contracts (or "exchange"); and
(2) completion.

Exchange is when you sign written contracts to buy and sell the house, and pay a deposit (c 10%) to the seller. At that point the buyer is legally committed to the purchase, can't back out gratuitously without consequences, and should insure the property, because it is (in equity) his. Likewise the seller is legally compelled to sell (by completing the sale - below) and can't back out gratuitously without consequences.

Completion is when the balance of the purchase money is paid and received, and when the title to the property is conveyed from seller to buyer. At that point the buyer becomes the legal owner of the property. The mechanics of completion in a simple two-party transaction rest on the purchaser producing the purchase monies. If there is a mortgagee involved, then the mortgage monies have to be advanced to the buyer's lawyer in advance, who will transfer them upon completion to the seller's lawyer (and perhaps from there to the seller's mortgagee to discharge any mortgage the seller had). The real process is even more granular than that.

Time between contract and completion can vary from same day to a few weeks. I think these days a couple of weeks is pretty standard.

Prior to exchange, everything is a free for all. By which I mean that a buyer can come along, make an offer (the property is then described as "under offer"); the seller may accept the offer, but until exchange (a) either party may walk away consequence free; or (b) the seller may decide that he wants more; or (c) the buyer may decide he wants to pay less; either of (b) or (c) may lead to (a). Things can get pretty stressful at this phase.

The reasons things can go wild in the free for all are myriad. A few:
- the buyer puts in an offer. Then goes to his mortgagee to borrow. The mortgagee sends round a surveyor who values the property materially lower than the purchase price. The mortgagee then won't lend what the buyer wants to borrow. Either the offer is withdrawn or lowered.
- The buyer is himself selling his property to trade up. His buyer (the sub-buyer) goes through the steps above. Suddenly the buyer doesn't have a sub-buyer or the buyer is short of funds.
- The seller is himself buying a property to trade up. His seller (the sub-seller) dicks around with their transaction and suddenly the seller needs more out of the buyer to make his onward purchase work.
- the survey (see above) reveals a problem with the house that requires money to be spent on it before the mortgagee will lend. The buyer is short of cash.

And so on.

As soon as you have three parties (sub-buyer, the buyer, the seller) you have a chain. Chains can be short (3) or long (lots - eg > 10). Because at least some people in the chain will be dependent on mortgage finance and won't have their own cash lying around to complete everyone has to complete on the same day. Which requires co-ordination and means that one problem somewhere in the chain can screw everyone.

You're in the prior to exchange free for all stage; your buyer has to sell their house to be able to buy the house you're selling. Despite what you might think reading the above, mostly house sales and purchases go reasonably well with a degree of stress along the way. When we sold our last house our buyer tried the classic dick move: 3 days before exchange he announced he wanted the reduce the agreed price. He was a cash buyer and just looking to score some points. He was buying for his daughters and I came *this* close to telling him to piss off and if he came back later he'd be told to piss off again - he would never be allowed to buy our house (I knew his wife was super keen on our house for her gals, so that would have been a statement with teeth). As it was, he moderated a bit, we chipped the people we were buying from (who'd gone to Aus leaving an empty house so were v keen to sell) and got the fucking estate agent (shitbag) to chip in the rest from her commission. But that was a tricky moment.

NB: in England the estate agent acts for the seller. He does not act for both parties, and the buyer won't have an estate agent acting on the purchase side (though usually will have one acting for him on the sale of his own property).

Thank you all!

This is all very helpful. Now my sister and I have to explain to my Mum and surviving uncle!

You've been luckier than people we know then! Just in the last couple of years close friends and family have had the following:

- Chain collapsed the day before contracts were due to exchange because their buyer's buyer "found a house they liked better" and pulled out, screwing up 4 property transactions. By the time they had another buyer/chain lined up they'd missed out on the property they wanted to buy
- Buyer reduced their offer by £20,000 the day before contracts were exchanged, this happened to my parents as they were moving from our family home to their retirement home. Buyer claimed it was due to the "unexpected" cost of rewiring the house, when from the very start it was made clear the house was in need of an overhaul and was a "doer upper", plus the survey had been done weeks earlier. Basically the f***er just saw an opportunity to take advantage of an older couple, and to my chagrin they gave him what he wanted as they didn't want to risk losing the house they were buying which it had taken a year to find. There was some payback though as it was quite a tightknit neighbourhood that my parents had lived in for 30 years, and everybody knew the stunt they'd pulled. They were completely ostracised by all the neighbours and ended up leaving the neighbourhood again about 2 years later. Karma's a bitch...
- Seller put the price up £10k the week before exchange, because they'd received a better offer.
- Old lady who decided at the last minute that she didn't want to sell after all and pulled out when my friend had already paid for searches, survey, lawyers, etc plus had buyers on their house ready to go. And then unbelievably a year later another friend told me they'd had an offer accepted on a house, showed me the link - same house, same seller, same agent. Told him to walk away or risk getting screwed. Agent somehow managed to convince him that this time she was serious and the previous year there'd been some kind of family crisis which had spooked her. Lo and behold, she pulls the same stunt again!

My honest opinion is both that the UK system sucks and that there's an awful lot of people out there who are arseholes, inconsiderate, selfish or just plain weird. Even our purchases which have all been chain-free and relatively smooth have been littered with bizarre episodes. Like the seller who claimed that our surveyor spent 20 minutes alone in their daughter's bedroom with the door shut, accused him of going through her underwear drawer, and said that if he denied this then we couldn't trust anything he said including his report on the rising damp in the house. Or the buyer who continued to contact me via email and text messages 5 years after he'd bought my flat with details of whatever his latest maintenance issue was. Or the seller who told me on the day we completed that he had decided, completely unprompted and unrequested, to get the loft lined with insulation as our survey had picked up on this. I was a bit confused but said thanks. And then went into the loft the next day where there wasn't a single scrap of new insulation to be seen...

Agree with all of that.

I was the end of a chain last year.

Offer to exchange 7+ months.

Exchange and completion on same day.

Buyers were clinically insane: 2 City lawyers, ones father had been a partner at a magic circle firm so they insisted on using a guy who ordinarily only does transactions at the uhnw end of the market. So he didn't care and it turned out there were some odd old deed issues so if took forever

We ended up having a 6 week conversation about the boundary because of the thickness of the lines on the land registry maps. Each email takes a 3-4 days response so one query a week.

To be absolutely fair, as prices tumbled last year they asked for a 1% discount and I was already paying their sdlt. I dodged a bullet as I had a large bridge in place for a few weeks.

The UK market is a total shit show but the route to success is a great estate agent and a good specialist conveyancer.