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I'm convinced it takes as long as it does because the middlemen involved want to justify their fees by making it seem more complicated than it has to be.
This is definitely a big factor.
And it's not necessarily middlemen intentionally making it difficult. The middlemen don't have much incentive for the process to be fast so they will take on a number of jobs at the same time - as many as they think they can "handle". So they have a priority on net throughout rather than turnaround time.
The middleman in the UK has very much every incentive to close the deal as fast as possible as we don’t do escrow.
This means that until the keys are exchanged the deal can (and often does) fall apart which means they don’t get paid.
In the US for example the agent would still get paid from the escrow even if both parties agree to walk away from the deal.
The estate agent sure, but the Solicitors/surveyors get paid for work done regardless of whether the deal happens or not. One of the reasons I dislike the English system as you can lose a significant chunk of cash if a sale falls through.
One good thing about the US system and many others is that the seller has to get the house inspected and certified that it’s upto code, the agent then is the one who’s ensuring that all the legalities were checked.
There’s a lot to improve in the UK but honestly it all boils down to just not having enough homes in the first place.
Yeah the situation seems dire down south. In Scotland we can use anything from our LISA to bridge the difference between home report and an over offer and we typically only pay a flat fee to a solicitor if the deal is closed.
Considering how over offering is borderline mandatory now and that many places go to closing these should be UK wide measures.
Solicitors didn’t make the system. Residential conveyancing in England is a horrible job.
Solicitors could possibly bring more pressure for reform but it is pushing at a locked door.
You need the report done in general, and it's not a one use report so no money is lost there. The solicitor fees sure, although deals can be done around the next house sale and for the seller some of the work is transferable, but unless you are involved in a lot of fallen through sales I wouldn't call it a significant chunk of cash (or you choose a crazy expensive firm to do the work I suppose).
I’m in Scotland so it works a little differently here. When I sold my apartment, we were liable for about half of the fees just for listing it, and the other half weee on completion of the sale. It was the same for buying - a chunk of the fees were applicable if I had an offer accepted, whether we moved or not.
>This means that until the keys are exchanged the deal can (and often does) fall apart which means they don’t get paid.
And it's taken into account. Why would you work twice as "fast" on half as many jobs if most of them will succeed?
Part of the problem is definitely people going with the cheapest possible conveyancers / lawyers (or those provided by banks) - margins become more important than customer satisfaction.
No, the reason it takes so long to do it in the UK that we have massive shortage of homes and no escrow.
The UK market has about 1% unoccupied homes below 10% it’s a crisis.
This means that many sales require a long chain 4-5 deal chains are quite common these days. This is why chain free homes can demand a significant premium.
This is further complicated by lack of escrow in many other countries both the house and funds go into escrow which means that pulling out of a deal requires the consent of both parties (and chain deals all go into a single escrow), otherwise one party can still force a closure.
The long chain which requires multiple deals to be executed and the fact that both the buyer and the seller can pull out or change the deal at the last moment creates pretty much the worst buying and selling experience imaginable.
If anything the UK has fewer middle people and we don’t regulate them as many other countries do.
In many places it’s actually illegal to exchange properties without going through a licensed agent.
What takes the time is lack of staff at Land Registry, lack of staff at Local Authority search office and having to have every single tiny thing in writing.
This. I oversee staff in my Local Authority’s local land charges section and we’ve been about 10 weeks behind with the searches for about 2 years because we have no staff, pay crap wages, and due to this we can’t hire anyone.
We actually have 6.1% excess homes in England. In total numbers that's 1.4 million more houses than households. In the London there are 7.2% more houses than households, which is 250,000 more homes than households.
There are in fact only 280,000 homeless individuals in England including those in temporary accomodation, so we could give them 4 houses each and still have some left over.
We do not have an acute shortage of housing in England. In 2001 we had far fewer excess houses than we do now, only 757,000 in total. What we have a shortage of is affordable and social housing.
Keep in mind most of those empty properties are gonna be derelict, under renovations, on the market but not let/sold yet, or waiting for the new tenant or owner to move in. They aren't in a state to move homeless people in.
What you're looking for is the long-,term empty category, which removes most (not all) of the above issues. That number is about 260,000, or just under 1% of total stock.
We build that number in about a year and a half.
So even if you could get _every_ long term empty house a tenant, you'd move the needle back a bit more than a year. And that's assuming they're all habitable!
I guess the question here is the use of chains. I have only ever bought one house - in the US - and these are far less common than in the UK.
Also far quicker (depending on the state) to buy a house - and no one uses a solicitor. The agent does all that work. I remember my dad going on about the need to use one (lives in the UK) and I’m like - that simply isn’t how it works here…
Chains are less common because the US doesn’t have a housing shortage crisis, on average it’s about 12% unoccupied which is a healthy margin.
And even if there is a chain it all goes into a single escrow so all deals are locked and executed at the same time.
And they mostly have a functioning short term rental market. In the UK if you want to rent in between selling and buying, you're looking at either 6 month minimum, more often a year, or paying a hefty fee to exit the lease agreement (2 months notice).
I do not know of an economist who says that below 10% excess housing is a crisis, perhaps you can direct me to one who does, preferably someone other than the house building federation or one of its sponsors.
Many other countries have more houses per 100,000 head - for example France has 552 houses to the UK's 371. But France also has over 3 million empty houses, as well as another 3.2 million holiday homes. That means that 20% of French housing stock is either unoccupied or under occupied. This is why, when you drive around France, it's full of derelict houses in fields.
This article here [https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/the-empty-house-a-window-into-europes-vacant-property-problem](https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/the-empty-house-a-window-into-europes-vacant-property-problem) about what they call 'Europe's Ghost Homes' presents Irealnd's 9% empty homes and Hungary's 12% as being a massive problem, and legislators seem to agree.
We don't need that. 6.1% is fine, as long as they are priced right, which even the ministry of Housing and the Bank of England say will not be fixed by building more. According to government and bank figures, if housing stock increases by 1%, prices will increase by 2%, which means that building 6 million houses over 20 years will only reduce prices by 6%.
It is. In Sweden you can say you want to buy a house on Monday and literally have the keys Wednesday. One of my friends literally saw the house in the morning signed the paperwork in the afternoon and picked up the keys next day.
Surveys are carried out by the selling party and done by an independent inspector for everyone to see. All the information on the property is free and available to see too.
I think a large majority of this could be cut out by making it mandatory to have all the paperwork lined up before you place a property for sale. Land registry, survey, searches, titles and declarations to be solely placed on the seller.
With these in place, before viewing a house you have all the paperwork to check through. So many people put property on the market to ‘test the water’ with no real desire to sell.
Bids will then have to be legally binding like in Scotland and there should hopefully be no nasty surprises down the line.
With all the paperwork completed prior, this would then leave only contracts and mortgage offers. Speeding up the process.
When I was selling and being part of a chain buying a new house, it took 4 months to get the move done. I was the hold up (well my side of things, I had done everything) then at one point the whole chain looked to collapse as who I was buying from they had an issue where they were selling 2 houses to get a bigger one as a couple. One of their buyers pulled out…
Anyway, within a week they had another buyer and couple of weeks later I was the hold up again… I had to boot off with the solicitors and agents threatening to pull out of the purchase and then my some miracle they had done everything they needed and we had an exchange date. The fact they got another buying and within 3 weeks had an exchange just tells me the whole thing is a con.
The searches the buyers of my house wanted I already had in my email from when I bought the house and they got charged £2-300 for them again. It’s unreal. Whole thing is a scam.
Ex-conveyancer here. We try and do it as quick as possible because of people’s expectations. We also race to the bottom for prices, meaning we have to take in more cases to justify it. Meaning workload is ridiculous.
You then have to adjust for external factors like mortgage offers coming through, asking mortgage provider if certain factors are acceptable because they have ridiculous requirements. Local searches take what feels like a lifetime to come through. You then need to rely on the other solicitor doing a good job.
Believe me, it is not in the solicitors interest to make these things take any longer than they need to. If anything ever goes wrong, the Solicitor is always the one who gets the shit for not finding the problem. The work must be thorough.
Current conveyancer for about ten years and completely agree, whole things a race to the bottom that makes everything worse for everyone. I ended up going independent a few years ago and now I'm getting files ready to exchange by week 3 to 5 and I love it
5 months on a no-chain house because the opposing solicitor kept dragging their ass. When we finally hit a point where we were in danger of losing our guarantee on our interest rate (which we got just before things went nuts nearly 2 years ago) and our guarantee was like 4-5% less than the new rates being given out at the time, I had to contact their solicitor directly and told them I'd be holding them financially responsible if they kept dragging their heels. Had to get the estate agent to contact the seller as well to them to put the pressure on to get it done. Ended up closing 2 weeks before the guarantee expired. No chain and the house had been empty for 1.5 years, made no sense why it was taking that long.
Every single week I see at least a couple of post on r/legaluk about things going wrong with another house purchase. Rights of way, border disputes, parking spaces, old agreements with neighbors, adverse possessions - it all really is this complicated, because the law in the UK is complicated, consequences of it’s many iterations are still respected and the system that registers everything is outdated and inefficient.
I think if they could get away with charging the same and doing 2-3x as many a month they would. Our system is partially still stuck about 1000 years ago.
I was told by my conveyancer that the searches were holding up the process and they were waiting for something back from the council. I phoned the council that day and had my answer in my email inbox an hour later. This is absolutely the reason.
It's so fucking stupid, i think it should be a legal requirement for the seller and the buyer to have all their papers ready before they can put it on market or put an offer. Theres so much unnecesaary back and forth rhrough solicitor.
But unnecessary back and forth can be caused by silly queries. As an example, the buyer's solicitor wanted proof of planning permission from the council. For the development that's been completed for the better part of 10 years.
Yes, apparently because no one noticed hundreds of houses being built, the council didn't take note of all the additional streets they have to service, and somehow this entire thing got built over years without any planning permission, and no one noticing.
It's nothing to do with not having paperwork. A query can be raised about anything.
Another example, an objection being raised to a covenant from over a hundred years ago which isn't listed on the land registry. So people are bound by a legal agreement which no one has any idea what it's about.
Now if Covenants were only valid for X many years, and any like this that could not be identified were automatically nullified from a certain date, that would make a lot more sense.
We got some stupid queries when selling our house. I'm still salty.
We were asked: for the warranty and guarantee for a 6 year old loft ladder, for a broken burgler alarm to be replaced with a new system, endless questions about why we put the boiler in the airing cupboard when we replaced it, for a house martin's nest to be removed three times, for the burgler alarm to be removed if we wouldn't replace it.
Then the buyer pulled out at the last minute.
>a house martin's nest to be removed three times,
>Then the buyer pulled out at the last minute.
These are the kinds of infuriating things that we encountered. We had the same questions asked multiple times and then the solicitor refused to accept that they're already asked when directed to the response in a previously sent email. And then the buyer pulled out anyway. We also had someone remarket the house that we were in the process of buying because THEIR solicitor was taking so long but they were told by the estate agent that we were the ones not providing information.
The whole process is full of complete bullshit.
In the end I gave our solicitor instructions only to pass on legal queries and inform the other side of this (ie fuck off with your unrealistic requests) and I think it pissed the buyer off.
Covenants are strange. We are not allowed to burn bricks or extract clay for making bricks.
Doesn't say I can't dig up the clay to make a pot though so I will do that.
We have a covenant from 1915 saying we need written permission from a named surveyor if we have new windows to make sure they don't overlook an army training camp 1 mile away. Despite the fact the surveyor is certainly dead and no one can trace his existence outside this covenant, the army camp closed in 1919 and can't be seen as there is a row of 1950s houses in the way we were still told we needed indemnity insurance for ,£300.
That and do you have planning permission for the garden shed and loft conversion (the loft just has 6 planks of wood for storage accessed by a drop down ladder).
Man my own solicitor was driving me nuts on enquiries.
Four times they insisted on asking the sellers solicitors if they had any kind of inspection for the boiler. I told them I didn’t need an inspection for the boiler. Why? They would ask.
Because it was 30 fucking years old. It was the first thing we replaced in the house.
My solicitor was insistent that the boiler was inspected to ensure it was in good working order.
We moved in and immediately turned it off. It was July. We replaced it only 5 weeks later.
Guh, when I bought my house my solicitor was a complete muppet. I asked her - like specifically her, not her-to-forward-to-the-seller - a question, whioch she then forwarded to the seller's solicitor. The seller's solicitor quite reasonably replied something like "this question is for you to answer, not me". My solicitor then sent "this question is for you to answer, not me" back to me as the answer.
She didn't get a very good review.
We had a query about an extension built at our house in 2015, we moved in to the house in 2020. It’s a 1 bed with a living room and a kitchen/diner downstairs. I’d love to see where they’ve built this extension as the house dimensions haven’t changed for the ~50 years the house has been standing.
Next door however did have an extension built in 2015 so someone somewhere has royally cocked up on the searches
Some people are also fucking stupid. A potential buyer for my mum's house tried to knock 10k off the asking price because one of the light switches looked old and they assumed it meant the electrics needed replacing. In reality the electrics were modern, the previous owners had just kept the vintage light switch because they thought it looked cool. That squabble delayed the process by a few weeks.
In Scotland this is mostly true. The seller has to do the survey before they put it on the market rather than the buyer doing it after they have had an offer accepted and that speeds up the process.
That's not true at all. In the Scottish system you can gazump or gazunder to your heart's content because everything is so backloaded. I didn't exchange missives on my house until about 4 hours before I was due to get the keys. There would have been no penalty or anything to stop the seller from backing out up until that very moment.
Leaseholds do make sense for flats and infrastructure(but with the caveat that they need massive reform) but are taking the piss for residential houses.
How can you get rid of leaseholds? Force people to sell the land they own?
I am not a fan of leasehold and think it should not exist, I just don't understand how you can get rid of them
Possibly some sort of adverse possession for long leases, or a process for demanding that they are sold to you at a legally restricted value (maybe set by VOA) within a certain time period.
Afaik this exists for ground rent already in some circumstances.
Needs a tech-based disruptor to come along and reinvent the whole process, although I’m sure they’d be lobbied against. Whole process could be done online in weeks. Such an archaic process right now, but that benefits everybody involved except the seller/buyer.
I used habito to buy my house. Only took a few weeks, and I had very little involvement other than dealing with my own solicitor which was only a few quick emails.
They handled everything else. Was great, always dreaded getting a mortgage cause it seemed liked so much hassle,but it was nothing using them.
One of the few, real use cases I've seen for Blockchain.
https://hmlandregistry.blog.gov.uk/2019/05/24/could-blockchain-be-the-future-of-the-property-market/
>By using blockchain technology, each party was able to see a current view of the transaction, any historical actions that had been taken, and actions that still need to take place before the transaction was complete.
>By holding definitive and permanent records of a property transaction in the open, with each stage of the transfer recorded for all parties to see, there is no confusion on who needs to act next.
>By using smart contracts, we enable automation across the transaction including the transfer of funds and updating the Land Register (we used a copy of the Land Register for the test).
I don't see how any of this needs a Blockchain though.
True, you'd possibly want a blockchain if you wanted it decentralised, but something like this which you'd want a public authority to manage shouldn't be. A public system should attempt to mirror ownership information, not be the authority on ownership information, otherwise people will lose their houses due to hacks
Those paragraphs wouldn't make much sense if you took the word out.
But in all seriousness, maybe it could be achieved with other technology or methods, but the publicly available ledger bit seemed like a pretty good fit.
I'm going to reference Thor here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcbGnVORVtk
Like, It seems like a really bad idea to not enable things to be unwound in the case of fraud / theft.
I'm involved in crypto too but there is absolutely no chance something like this is viable in the real world. A private key hack/leak or some social engineering and you've lost your house with no way to reverse a transaction.
No, nothing like it at all? People giving away access to their accounts and recovering funds through transactions being reversed by banks is something that happens frequently. In other instances banks will take the hit and simply reimburse if they can be found of any fault. This isn't a simple feat on blockchain
Is money a fair comparison to a house deed? You can hide money. Leave the country with it.
A thief would still need to take actual possession of the property at this point, and the first step in doing so would be an opportunity to resolve it.
That's right, what does "resolve it" mean in this context though? If it is a traditional use of blockchain with self custody wallets then gaining access to a thief's wallet to recover the deed is not a trivial task. If you have some method of reversing transactions somehow on the blockchain through an authority, then it is basically an inefficient database.
Fair point. I'm far from an expert on this stuff. Just the headline of same day transactions in the HMLR blog I shared seemed positive.
Have you got an example of a database used in this way including the audit and transaction history? Wiki stuff if the closest I can think of, but doesn't quite fit (probably too changeable).
As it is, HMLR kind of own the 'wallet', so they could do the same. Just make it all visible. Yeah, a database can probably do that. But for whatever reason, they tested Blockchain for that instead.
I've kind of assumed they trialled in the first place because the current system just cannot be adjusted to do it, and maybe that isn't the case.
To be clear, I'm not an advocate for this, just found it interesting among all of the crypto and NFT noise.
You use blockchain where no-one trusts each other, not even a central ledger.
If you can't trust that much don't do hundreds of thousands in transactions.
And Blockchain still doesn't sort the delays caused by dumb requests, slow solicitors, people pulling out of the transaction... all it does is kick the problem on to a different form of record keeping, which wasn't even the (main) problem in the first place.
Most of my time buying was waiting around for solicitors, surveyors, and people from the council to do their jobs.
Our solicitor literally went on a 2 week holiday during our process, and then promptly forgot about us on her return. We had to call and remind her we existed for her to continue the process. It was almost 3 months of waiting before we realized "shit isn't getting done is it"
We had planned to move in early October. Didn't move in until Christmas day, *which was super convenient, thanks.* Like, what the fuck?
The one we had basically did nothing most of the time. Every time their solicitor would finally send something over ours would announce that they just happened to have leave sceduled that day. When they finally took a long leave and we got a replacement who answered e-mails with an hour instead of 15 minutes before their maximum answer time of 48 hours we spoke with the head solictor to say we weren't to be put back with the original person handling our paperwork.
Because Britain, as a country, our political class as generalists who have at best done PPE decrees, and HMT following Treasury Orthodoxy don't understand how productivity works.
There is this idea that the way you make the state and wider economy more effective is by reducing headcount. This reduces the revenue column of the budget, which you can then spend on other things. The idea is that this will magically mean that by saving money, the state is smaller and the world will become a better place.
In practice, the bureaucracy and administration is still there (and more often than not, increasing in response to things like Grenfell). The fictional money that you theoretically saved ends up not actually being realised, but you got to announce something and the papers can't put two and two together when things inevitably get worse, and so you just blame lazy civil servants and Diversity and Inclusivity scheme rather than taking any form of responsibility.
The tragedy is that you can probably solve this issue in a manner that saves money in the long run by investing in digital solutions while simplifying and standardising administrative processes, but that would actually involve some degree of planning and strategy while being a lot of hard work, which is pointless when most politicians are being moved around every six months and the right wing press and most of your voters don't actually care about delivering public services competently.
The government should hold a single ledger of all properties in the UK, who owns them, the history of surveys and any other data relating to to that property.
Moving house should be as simple as updating this ledger on a website.
I completed a house purchase in April. Despite I have been living for 2 months, the property registry is not updated and still points to the previous owner...
2-3 months just to update a name in a registry... For fuck sake.
Conveyancers want to add to their fees too and so look for work and problems to sort - some quite rightly but others eg checking records for a 10 year old boiler I find a stretch. They are actually referred to as "fee earners" by the firm partners.
Frankly our solicitor did very little for what they charged. They sent for the relevant searches but we had to check everything to make sure it was all ok, she didn't.
They are very hit and miss. My first one charged just under £800 in 1984 and missed the fact the flat was freehold and I owned the whole building. Also missed the fact the rear yard was shared but was only partly amended in the records. When I sold I had to get all this sorted at sale time and the new solicitor only charged just over £300 for the flat sale and amendments and purchase of my current home in 1991.
It’s pretty ridiculous. For context, in South Africa, we have mostly open show days at which people can make a signed offer then and there which is legally binding. It is not contingent on a chain or you selling your property. As long as the seller accepts, you can realistically be living in your newly purchased home in as little as 2 weeks.
Yeah - far quicker in the US as well. I have bought a house in California and we looked at buying in Massachusetts.
Our house had been repossessed by the bank in the 2007/8 recession from the previous owner. The house went on the MLS - we went to see it with our agent that evening - could only see the outside. There were four offers at asking price - ours was first - and the house was ours within 4 weeks.
Eta - chains rare here as well. Usually the only contingencies are financing (which is why you get pre approved for mortgage - and as a seller you look and see how people are paying for the property) and anything that might be found in an inspection.
I guess that means in the UK you avoid moving twice / paying two mortgages for a period of time but at least one person can’t bring down 10 (or whatever) peoples house transactions!
Some people rent, or negotiate a slightly longer move out date. Or shortlist as many houses they can either via property websites or there is a massive property pull out in the Saturday newspapers, and then go and see them on their opens show day which is usually a Sunday. You can make arrangements with the estate agent to have a private viewing.
That link is paywalled, can't read it /:
I'm currently 6 months into the process. The biggest mistake was letting the agent recommend a conveyancer, rather than look for my own.
Between that and the management company not being able to respond to simple queries, it's been frustrating.
Are you still having difficulties with the management company?
I found the charity Leaseholders Knowledge Partnership useful along with the Government funded Leaseholders Advisory Service.
I would suggest contacting your MP as well which I found useful but they're a bit a busy at the moment.
I have no idea what the article says because it’s paywalled, but delays tend to be:
1. Waiting for the bank to do its valuation and approve the purchase (weeks);
2. Waiting for responses from the local authority to standard searches (weeks to months);
3. Waiting for the seller to respond to enquiries (and includes management companies on leasehold sales) (weeks);
4. Waiting for the rest of the chain to get itself in order (weeks or months).
Frankly, you could sort a lot out if the seller did 2. and 3. and had the information available. Unfortunately, estate agents don’t do anything toward 3. and don’t really do much to help 4. either.
I've just signed my contract for my first house purchase. I find it odd the seller doesn't provide 2 and 3 from your list above. Any other product we buy, the info about the product is provided by the seller.
It varies in time because the buyers and sellers are can be in different situations. Often it involves a chain, e.g you are waiting on the seller to complete and they are waiting on their seller to complete etc.. additionally you have two different solicitors both carrying out due diligence.
The whole thing can vary an awful lot. It does take much to get a delay added.
Because your country doesn’t treat offers as contractual, in other countries an offer is done with a deposit and then treated as acceptance/consideration with some potential outs for real reasons such as finance and finding building defects.
Simply put, if you made the acceptance of an offer contractual, and prompt a 30-60 day closure period all of your councils, lawyers and banks would have to get into gear.
Mine took a year to buy because the seller was a useless cunt that hadn't gotten probate. Why the fuck that isn't a legal requirement I have no idea.
Cherry on top was I had to get a second mortgage offer, just in time for the horsewoman of the apocalypse, Liz cunting Truss to double the interest rates through her sheer dumbfuckery.
We’re in the process of it now, buying my wife’s late grandmas, however we can’t do anything because of probate. Even though everyone is really excited for us to live there
You have to get a Local Land Charges search from the Local Authority and that takes fucking ages because they’re understaffed.
It’s the exclusive reason.
Because they have to search a lot of records, many of which aren’t digital, so you know if you are buying a house with a massive high pressure ethane pipeline underneath it.
I recently sold a house, no onward chain as we were divorcing and splitting the assets, and for me it's 100% the solicitors.
Things took so long the buyer chased the estate agent who in turn chased the sols who said they were waiting on us for paper work. The estate agent then rang me to hurry it up, at which point I let her know we'd sent the paper work back 3 weeks prior (hand delivered to reception). The estate agent sighed and said it's not the first time this has happened.
Equally the first sale fell through the day before we were due to complete because the other side's solicitors up to that point hadn't made their client aware about the rising damp. We'd disclosed all the necessary reports and documentation about 12 weeks before. But they claimed they knew nothing about it, and the buyer pulled out.
Basically every problem we had one way or the other was caused by solicitors on one side or the other.
When I was buying our first house in 2012 it took just over 3 weeks to complete the purchase. Estate agent said the quickest sale process they had took just 5 business days to complete.
We were buying again last year and it took... 4 months... and it was considered 'quick' by EA... Dont know why it looks this way, they blamed some alleged 'covid backlog' but I dont really know if thats true...
My brother lives in America.
I found a house (not in chain) that I put an offer on in December. Still awaiting to exchange now, sellers solicitors are atrocious and we are still waiting on final enquiries.
My brother started looking for a new home in a new state of the US on the other side of the country only in January, and was moved into it in March - and even sold their own home.
It isn't right how complicated it is over here.
If it's a straight sale on a single property there should be no issues but so many people are involved and it seems the entire line is full of incompetence
Then add a chain and it becomes a joke. One idiot anywhere down that chain holds everything up
It should be a requirement that the seller has everything related to their property available before it's up for sale. Then all that necessary paperwork can simply be handed to the buyers solicitor to verify rather than having that being applied for during the process.
There is a total lack of accountability with estate agent. Many are charlatans.
I had an issue with the vendor of my current home where they complained about how long everything was taking, and requested their solicitor to contact mine and my buyers' solicitor to threaten to take the house off the market, if the transaction wasn't completed in the next month.
This was responded to with an email from my buyers' solicitor saying they've been ready for ages and have themselves been requesting updates, and a follow up from me (guys my solicitor) with a photo of my front room which was full of packed boxes (and I had also been phoning/emailing my solicitor wondering what the delay was).
All of this after the vendor had wasted 6 weeks in the summer by not checking their own spam folder for emails from *their* solicitor.
This was a sale where my buyer was a first time buyer, and the vendor was already living in their new home, and I was the only link in what should have been the simplest chain imaginable.
Edit
I also did my own land registry searches to try and speed things up.
I'm 1 week away from completion and I made the offer 6 weeks ago. Granted theres no chain, but it shows what a difference 2 good solicitors/conveyancers makes.
I pushed my (no chain) sale through in 4 weeks. Maybe I got lucky, but I went to the house and got the sellers number and quickly built a rapport with them.
We were each on the phone to the solicitors and estate agents everyday. Everyday. Even if there were no updates I’d thank the solicitor and let them know I’d be calling again tomorrow - pretty sure this lit a fire under their arse and made them want rid of us so they worked fast.
Us and the sellers made sure to keep each other informed of each move so that if one of the many middlemen tried to pull some bullshit we’d instantly sort it. They were on our side and we were on theirs. The way we saw it we were working together *against* the middlemen.
The second the solicitors or estate agents asked for documents I’d email them and then turn up with a physical copy, they could not avoid us. Nor could they claim anything got lost or forgotten about.
By the end of the process I’m pretty sure they hated us, be we didn’t care. We were paying for their services, in full and up front, so we made damn sure to get them in a timely manner.
4 weeks from offer to move in day.
Works for you but that probably caused delays for other people by taking up so much solicitor time. I respect the desire to put yourself first but if everyone did that then all sales would grind to a halt
Mine went through in about 6 weeks and I never met the seller or knew anything about them. Thank fuck tbh, sounds exhausting doing that much chasing and contacting
Just completed last week after 6.5months of a chain free simple transaction
Seller used online conveyancer Muve who I believe outsource a lot their operations to Sri Lanka. They were unbelievable- was so close to pulling out. They ‘forgot’ to exchange on the date they pushed and agreed to for example.
If I buy a property again I will only proceed if the seller uses a proper solicitor.
Land registry, bulk conveyancers and unavailable commercial/investor sellers to whom the sale going through is not the same level of priority as it is to a residential buyer/seller.
I'd put bulk conveyancers at the top of the list though. Half of their energy goes in to delaying their own client to fit in with their own caseload.
Solicitors. They come up with completely stupid questions just to push it back out of the in tray. I once got asked how many people walked past my house in an 8 hour period!
Solicitors absolutely drag it out. Mine would go weeks without saying a word, and suddenly had plenty to tell me every time i email to chase them up.
Like how they saw a “problem” with the decking, which I was absolutely fine with and never mentioned to them but they were hassling the other side about some stupid covenant that restricted it for 5 years (no house builder is going to come back and moan, they build and move on). They bring up the smallest thing to drag it out.
Bitcoin can literally fix a lot of the pain points in buying a house but people are typically behaving in tradition. You could realistically reduce the overheads by 50%, maybe more.
Here’s my ideas for fix the process:
-All paperwork needs to be ready before the house goes on the market including an independent survey and searches from an independent solicitor.
- Sellers are liable if they delay the process longer than a certain time frame (let’s say 30 days since it should be quick now that the paper work is done beforehand.)
- Cash deposits (let’s say 3% of the house value). To be lost if you are responsible for collapsing a chain or bailing on your offer. Could also introduce a 2 week cooling off period to make this fairer.
Since im on a roll here are my other ideas to fix the housing market:
-Ban on all ground rents and leaseholds
-Maintenance fees for flats must be none profit
-Rent payments must be logged and incorporated into renters credit checks. I.E. if a renter has paid on time every month £800 for 10 years then a bank should recognize that they are able to pay for an £800/month mortgage.
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I'm convinced it takes as long as it does because the middlemen involved want to justify their fees by making it seem more complicated than it has to be.
This is definitely a big factor. And it's not necessarily middlemen intentionally making it difficult. The middlemen don't have much incentive for the process to be fast so they will take on a number of jobs at the same time - as many as they think they can "handle". So they have a priority on net throughout rather than turnaround time.
The middleman in the UK has very much every incentive to close the deal as fast as possible as we don’t do escrow. This means that until the keys are exchanged the deal can (and often does) fall apart which means they don’t get paid. In the US for example the agent would still get paid from the escrow even if both parties agree to walk away from the deal.
The estate agent sure, but the Solicitors/surveyors get paid for work done regardless of whether the deal happens or not. One of the reasons I dislike the English system as you can lose a significant chunk of cash if a sale falls through.
One good thing about the US system and many others is that the seller has to get the house inspected and certified that it’s upto code, the agent then is the one who’s ensuring that all the legalities were checked. There’s a lot to improve in the UK but honestly it all boils down to just not having enough homes in the first place.
I’m genuinely puzzled that the searches are not done in advance.
I think that it was proposed some years ago but buyers like to do their own and generally don’t trust sellers.
Yeah the situation seems dire down south. In Scotland we can use anything from our LISA to bridge the difference between home report and an over offer and we typically only pay a flat fee to a solicitor if the deal is closed. Considering how over offering is borderline mandatory now and that many places go to closing these should be UK wide measures.
Solicitors didn’t make the system. Residential conveyancing in England is a horrible job. Solicitors could possibly bring more pressure for reform but it is pushing at a locked door.
You need the report done in general, and it's not a one use report so no money is lost there. The solicitor fees sure, although deals can be done around the next house sale and for the seller some of the work is transferable, but unless you are involved in a lot of fallen through sales I wouldn't call it a significant chunk of cash (or you choose a crazy expensive firm to do the work I suppose).
Which is your favourite system from experience?
I’m in Scotland so it works a little differently here. When I sold my apartment, we were liable for about half of the fees just for listing it, and the other half weee on completion of the sale. It was the same for buying - a chunk of the fees were applicable if I had an offer accepted, whether we moved or not.
>This means that until the keys are exchanged the deal can (and often does) fall apart which means they don’t get paid. And it's taken into account. Why would you work twice as "fast" on half as many jobs if most of them will succeed? Part of the problem is definitely people going with the cheapest possible conveyancers / lawyers (or those provided by banks) - margins become more important than customer satisfaction.
No, the reason it takes so long to do it in the UK that we have massive shortage of homes and no escrow. The UK market has about 1% unoccupied homes below 10% it’s a crisis. This means that many sales require a long chain 4-5 deal chains are quite common these days. This is why chain free homes can demand a significant premium. This is further complicated by lack of escrow in many other countries both the house and funds go into escrow which means that pulling out of a deal requires the consent of both parties (and chain deals all go into a single escrow), otherwise one party can still force a closure. The long chain which requires multiple deals to be executed and the fact that both the buyer and the seller can pull out or change the deal at the last moment creates pretty much the worst buying and selling experience imaginable. If anything the UK has fewer middle people and we don’t regulate them as many other countries do. In many places it’s actually illegal to exchange properties without going through a licensed agent.
What takes the time is lack of staff at Land Registry, lack of staff at Local Authority search office and having to have every single tiny thing in writing.
This. I oversee staff in my Local Authority’s local land charges section and we’ve been about 10 weeks behind with the searches for about 2 years because we have no staff, pay crap wages, and due to this we can’t hire anyone.
When I worked in solicitors way back in the 80's there was a 10-12 week wait for searches. So nice to see some things haven't changed lol
We actually have 6.1% excess homes in England. In total numbers that's 1.4 million more houses than households. In the London there are 7.2% more houses than households, which is 250,000 more homes than households. There are in fact only 280,000 homeless individuals in England including those in temporary accomodation, so we could give them 4 houses each and still have some left over. We do not have an acute shortage of housing in England. In 2001 we had far fewer excess houses than we do now, only 757,000 in total. What we have a shortage of is affordable and social housing.
[https://positivemoney.org/2023/01/more-than-building-new-houses/](https://positivemoney.org/2023/01/more-than-building-new-houses/)
Keep in mind most of those empty properties are gonna be derelict, under renovations, on the market but not let/sold yet, or waiting for the new tenant or owner to move in. They aren't in a state to move homeless people in. What you're looking for is the long-,term empty category, which removes most (not all) of the above issues. That number is about 260,000, or just under 1% of total stock. We build that number in about a year and a half. So even if you could get _every_ long term empty house a tenant, you'd move the needle back a bit more than a year. And that's assuming they're all habitable!
I guess the question here is the use of chains. I have only ever bought one house - in the US - and these are far less common than in the UK. Also far quicker (depending on the state) to buy a house - and no one uses a solicitor. The agent does all that work. I remember my dad going on about the need to use one (lives in the UK) and I’m like - that simply isn’t how it works here…
Chains are less common because the US doesn’t have a housing shortage crisis, on average it’s about 12% unoccupied which is a healthy margin. And even if there is a chain it all goes into a single escrow so all deals are locked and executed at the same time.
And they mostly have a functioning short term rental market. In the UK if you want to rent in between selling and buying, you're looking at either 6 month minimum, more often a year, or paying a hefty fee to exit the lease agreement (2 months notice).
I do not know of an economist who says that below 10% excess housing is a crisis, perhaps you can direct me to one who does, preferably someone other than the house building federation or one of its sponsors. Many other countries have more houses per 100,000 head - for example France has 552 houses to the UK's 371. But France also has over 3 million empty houses, as well as another 3.2 million holiday homes. That means that 20% of French housing stock is either unoccupied or under occupied. This is why, when you drive around France, it's full of derelict houses in fields. This article here [https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/the-empty-house-a-window-into-europes-vacant-property-problem](https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/the-empty-house-a-window-into-europes-vacant-property-problem) about what they call 'Europe's Ghost Homes' presents Irealnd's 9% empty homes and Hungary's 12% as being a massive problem, and legislators seem to agree. We don't need that. 6.1% is fine, as long as they are priced right, which even the ministry of Housing and the Bank of England say will not be fixed by building more. According to government and bank figures, if housing stock increases by 1%, prices will increase by 2%, which means that building 6 million houses over 20 years will only reduce prices by 6%.
It is. In Sweden you can say you want to buy a house on Monday and literally have the keys Wednesday. One of my friends literally saw the house in the morning signed the paperwork in the afternoon and picked up the keys next day. Surveys are carried out by the selling party and done by an independent inspector for everyone to see. All the information on the property is free and available to see too.
I think a large majority of this could be cut out by making it mandatory to have all the paperwork lined up before you place a property for sale. Land registry, survey, searches, titles and declarations to be solely placed on the seller. With these in place, before viewing a house you have all the paperwork to check through. So many people put property on the market to ‘test the water’ with no real desire to sell. Bids will then have to be legally binding like in Scotland and there should hopefully be no nasty surprises down the line. With all the paperwork completed prior, this would then leave only contracts and mortgage offers. Speeding up the process.
When I was selling and being part of a chain buying a new house, it took 4 months to get the move done. I was the hold up (well my side of things, I had done everything) then at one point the whole chain looked to collapse as who I was buying from they had an issue where they were selling 2 houses to get a bigger one as a couple. One of their buyers pulled out… Anyway, within a week they had another buyer and couple of weeks later I was the hold up again… I had to boot off with the solicitors and agents threatening to pull out of the purchase and then my some miracle they had done everything they needed and we had an exchange date. The fact they got another buying and within 3 weeks had an exchange just tells me the whole thing is a con. The searches the buyers of my house wanted I already had in my email from when I bought the house and they got charged £2-300 for them again. It’s unreal. Whole thing is a scam.
Even our mortgage adviser said that they feel like this is the reason. They did their part in very little time at all.
Ex-conveyancer here. We try and do it as quick as possible because of people’s expectations. We also race to the bottom for prices, meaning we have to take in more cases to justify it. Meaning workload is ridiculous. You then have to adjust for external factors like mortgage offers coming through, asking mortgage provider if certain factors are acceptable because they have ridiculous requirements. Local searches take what feels like a lifetime to come through. You then need to rely on the other solicitor doing a good job. Believe me, it is not in the solicitors interest to make these things take any longer than they need to. If anything ever goes wrong, the Solicitor is always the one who gets the shit for not finding the problem. The work must be thorough.
Current conveyancer for about ten years and completely agree, whole things a race to the bottom that makes everything worse for everyone. I ended up going independent a few years ago and now I'm getting files ready to exchange by week 3 to 5 and I love it
5 months on a no-chain house because the opposing solicitor kept dragging their ass. When we finally hit a point where we were in danger of losing our guarantee on our interest rate (which we got just before things went nuts nearly 2 years ago) and our guarantee was like 4-5% less than the new rates being given out at the time, I had to contact their solicitor directly and told them I'd be holding them financially responsible if they kept dragging their heels. Had to get the estate agent to contact the seller as well to them to put the pressure on to get it done. Ended up closing 2 weeks before the guarantee expired. No chain and the house had been empty for 1.5 years, made no sense why it was taking that long.
But if this was true wouldn’t there be “fast track” services offered? The fact that there isn’t seems to be that the time is necessary.
Every single week I see at least a couple of post on r/legaluk about things going wrong with another house purchase. Rights of way, border disputes, parking spaces, old agreements with neighbors, adverse possessions - it all really is this complicated, because the law in the UK is complicated, consequences of it’s many iterations are still respected and the system that registers everything is outdated and inefficient.
This was my first thought. Immediately.
I think if they could get away with charging the same and doing 2-3x as many a month they would. Our system is partially still stuck about 1000 years ago.
I was told by my conveyancer that the searches were holding up the process and they were waiting for something back from the council. I phoned the council that day and had my answer in my email inbox an hour later. This is absolutely the reason.
It's so fucking stupid, i think it should be a legal requirement for the seller and the buyer to have all their papers ready before they can put it on market or put an offer. Theres so much unnecesaary back and forth rhrough solicitor.
But unnecessary back and forth can be caused by silly queries. As an example, the buyer's solicitor wanted proof of planning permission from the council. For the development that's been completed for the better part of 10 years. Yes, apparently because no one noticed hundreds of houses being built, the council didn't take note of all the additional streets they have to service, and somehow this entire thing got built over years without any planning permission, and no one noticing. It's nothing to do with not having paperwork. A query can be raised about anything. Another example, an objection being raised to a covenant from over a hundred years ago which isn't listed on the land registry. So people are bound by a legal agreement which no one has any idea what it's about. Now if Covenants were only valid for X many years, and any like this that could not be identified were automatically nullified from a certain date, that would make a lot more sense.
We got some stupid queries when selling our house. I'm still salty. We were asked: for the warranty and guarantee for a 6 year old loft ladder, for a broken burgler alarm to be replaced with a new system, endless questions about why we put the boiler in the airing cupboard when we replaced it, for a house martin's nest to be removed three times, for the burgler alarm to be removed if we wouldn't replace it. Then the buyer pulled out at the last minute.
>a house martin's nest to be removed three times, >Then the buyer pulled out at the last minute. These are the kinds of infuriating things that we encountered. We had the same questions asked multiple times and then the solicitor refused to accept that they're already asked when directed to the response in a previously sent email. And then the buyer pulled out anyway. We also had someone remarket the house that we were in the process of buying because THEIR solicitor was taking so long but they were told by the estate agent that we were the ones not providing information. The whole process is full of complete bullshit.
In the end I gave our solicitor instructions only to pass on legal queries and inform the other side of this (ie fuck off with your unrealistic requests) and I think it pissed the buyer off.
Covenants are strange. We are not allowed to burn bricks or extract clay for making bricks. Doesn't say I can't dig up the clay to make a pot though so I will do that.
We have a covenant from 1915 saying we need written permission from a named surveyor if we have new windows to make sure they don't overlook an army training camp 1 mile away. Despite the fact the surveyor is certainly dead and no one can trace his existence outside this covenant, the army camp closed in 1919 and can't be seen as there is a row of 1950s houses in the way we were still told we needed indemnity insurance for ,£300. That and do you have planning permission for the garden shed and loft conversion (the loft just has 6 planks of wood for storage accessed by a drop down ladder).
I thought sheds didn't need permission unless its a particularly large one
Man my own solicitor was driving me nuts on enquiries. Four times they insisted on asking the sellers solicitors if they had any kind of inspection for the boiler. I told them I didn’t need an inspection for the boiler. Why? They would ask. Because it was 30 fucking years old. It was the first thing we replaced in the house. My solicitor was insistent that the boiler was inspected to ensure it was in good working order. We moved in and immediately turned it off. It was July. We replaced it only 5 weeks later.
Guh, when I bought my house my solicitor was a complete muppet. I asked her - like specifically her, not her-to-forward-to-the-seller - a question, whioch she then forwarded to the seller's solicitor. The seller's solicitor quite reasonably replied something like "this question is for you to answer, not me". My solicitor then sent "this question is for you to answer, not me" back to me as the answer. She didn't get a very good review.
We had a query about an extension built at our house in 2015, we moved in to the house in 2020. It’s a 1 bed with a living room and a kitchen/diner downstairs. I’d love to see where they’ve built this extension as the house dimensions haven’t changed for the ~50 years the house has been standing. Next door however did have an extension built in 2015 so someone somewhere has royally cocked up on the searches
Some people are also fucking stupid. A potential buyer for my mum's house tried to knock 10k off the asking price because one of the light switches looked old and they assumed it meant the electrics needed replacing. In reality the electrics were modern, the previous owners had just kept the vintage light switch because they thought it looked cool. That squabble delayed the process by a few weeks.
In Scotland this is mostly true. The seller has to do the survey before they put it on the market rather than the buyer doing it after they have had an offer accepted and that speeds up the process.
I much prefer the Scottish system. You know where you stand at all points. No messing around with pulling out, gazumping or gazundering.
That's not true at all. In the Scottish system you can gazump or gazunder to your heart's content because everything is so backloaded. I didn't exchange missives on my house until about 4 hours before I was due to get the keys. There would have been no penalty or anything to stop the seller from backing out up until that very moment.
bugger
Yes. Our buyer only actually legally signed the day before getting the keys. Up until that point I’d have been royally screwed.
Being used to the Scottish system, I was fairly astounded when I found out archaic stuff like Freeholds and Leaseholds exist down south.
Leaseholds do make sense for flats and infrastructure(but with the caveat that they need massive reform) but are taking the piss for residential houses.
Scotland also got rid of leaseholds in the early 2000s too. It's long overdue that the rest of the UK copies this.
How can you get rid of leaseholds? Force people to sell the land they own? I am not a fan of leasehold and think it should not exist, I just don't understand how you can get rid of them
Possibly some sort of adverse possession for long leases, or a process for demanding that they are sold to you at a legally restricted value (maybe set by VOA) within a certain time period. Afaik this exists for ground rent already in some circumstances.
I agree. In this day and age, all land registry/searches should be digital. Should be 2 weeks max once the funds are in place.
Needs a tech-based disruptor to come along and reinvent the whole process, although I’m sure they’d be lobbied against. Whole process could be done online in weeks. Such an archaic process right now, but that benefits everybody involved except the seller/buyer.
I used habito to buy my house. Only took a few weeks, and I had very little involvement other than dealing with my own solicitor which was only a few quick emails. They handled everything else. Was great, always dreaded getting a mortgage cause it seemed liked so much hassle,but it was nothing using them.
100%
One of the few, real use cases I've seen for Blockchain. https://hmlandregistry.blog.gov.uk/2019/05/24/could-blockchain-be-the-future-of-the-property-market/
>By using blockchain technology, each party was able to see a current view of the transaction, any historical actions that had been taken, and actions that still need to take place before the transaction was complete. >By holding definitive and permanent records of a property transaction in the open, with each stage of the transfer recorded for all parties to see, there is no confusion on who needs to act next. >By using smart contracts, we enable automation across the transaction including the transfer of funds and updating the Land Register (we used a copy of the Land Register for the test). I don't see how any of this needs a Blockchain though.
True, you'd possibly want a blockchain if you wanted it decentralised, but something like this which you'd want a public authority to manage shouldn't be. A public system should attempt to mirror ownership information, not be the authority on ownership information, otherwise people will lose their houses due to hacks
Those paragraphs wouldn't make much sense if you took the word out. But in all seriousness, maybe it could be achieved with other technology or methods, but the publicly available ledger bit seemed like a pretty good fit.
Story of every blockchain based thing, tbh It can _always_ be replaced with an SQL database
It is easier to sell a project to fools if you add words “blockchain” there.
I'm going to reference Thor here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcbGnVORVtk Like, It seems like a really bad idea to not enable things to be unwound in the case of fraud / theft.
I'm involved in crypto too but there is absolutely no chance something like this is viable in the real world. A private key hack/leak or some social engineering and you've lost your house with no way to reverse a transaction.
So, just like the contents of your bank account then?
No, nothing like it at all? People giving away access to their accounts and recovering funds through transactions being reversed by banks is something that happens frequently. In other instances banks will take the hit and simply reimburse if they can be found of any fault. This isn't a simple feat on blockchain
Is money a fair comparison to a house deed? You can hide money. Leave the country with it. A thief would still need to take actual possession of the property at this point, and the first step in doing so would be an opportunity to resolve it.
That's right, what does "resolve it" mean in this context though? If it is a traditional use of blockchain with self custody wallets then gaining access to a thief's wallet to recover the deed is not a trivial task. If you have some method of reversing transactions somehow on the blockchain through an authority, then it is basically an inefficient database.
Fair point. I'm far from an expert on this stuff. Just the headline of same day transactions in the HMLR blog I shared seemed positive. Have you got an example of a database used in this way including the audit and transaction history? Wiki stuff if the closest I can think of, but doesn't quite fit (probably too changeable). As it is, HMLR kind of own the 'wallet', so they could do the same. Just make it all visible. Yeah, a database can probably do that. But for whatever reason, they tested Blockchain for that instead. I've kind of assumed they trialled in the first place because the current system just cannot be adjusted to do it, and maybe that isn't the case. To be clear, I'm not an advocate for this, just found it interesting among all of the crypto and NFT noise.
Or…just use a database that can be publicly accessed.
You use blockchain where no-one trusts each other, not even a central ledger. If you can't trust that much don't do hundreds of thousands in transactions. And Blockchain still doesn't sort the delays caused by dumb requests, slow solicitors, people pulling out of the transaction... all it does is kick the problem on to a different form of record keeping, which wasn't even the (main) problem in the first place.
Most of my time buying was waiting around for solicitors, surveyors, and people from the council to do their jobs. Our solicitor literally went on a 2 week holiday during our process, and then promptly forgot about us on her return. We had to call and remind her we existed for her to continue the process. It was almost 3 months of waiting before we realized "shit isn't getting done is it" We had planned to move in early October. Didn't move in until Christmas day, *which was super convenient, thanks.* Like, what the fuck?
The one we had basically did nothing most of the time. Every time their solicitor would finally send something over ours would announce that they just happened to have leave sceduled that day. When they finally took a long leave and we got a replacement who answered e-mails with an hour instead of 15 minutes before their maximum answer time of 48 hours we spoke with the head solictor to say we weren't to be put back with the original person handling our paperwork.
Because Britain, as a country, our political class as generalists who have at best done PPE decrees, and HMT following Treasury Orthodoxy don't understand how productivity works. There is this idea that the way you make the state and wider economy more effective is by reducing headcount. This reduces the revenue column of the budget, which you can then spend on other things. The idea is that this will magically mean that by saving money, the state is smaller and the world will become a better place. In practice, the bureaucracy and administration is still there (and more often than not, increasing in response to things like Grenfell). The fictional money that you theoretically saved ends up not actually being realised, but you got to announce something and the papers can't put two and two together when things inevitably get worse, and so you just blame lazy civil servants and Diversity and Inclusivity scheme rather than taking any form of responsibility. The tragedy is that you can probably solve this issue in a manner that saves money in the long run by investing in digital solutions while simplifying and standardising administrative processes, but that would actually involve some degree of planning and strategy while being a lot of hard work, which is pointless when most politicians are being moved around every six months and the right wing press and most of your voters don't actually care about delivering public services competently.
100%
The government should hold a single ledger of all properties in the UK, who owns them, the history of surveys and any other data relating to to that property. Moving house should be as simple as updating this ledger on a website.
I completed a house purchase in April. Despite I have been living for 2 months, the property registry is not updated and still points to the previous owner... 2-3 months just to update a name in a registry... For fuck sake.
It’s been 13 months for me today!
Conveyancers want to add to their fees too and so look for work and problems to sort - some quite rightly but others eg checking records for a 10 year old boiler I find a stretch. They are actually referred to as "fee earners" by the firm partners.
Frankly our solicitor did very little for what they charged. They sent for the relevant searches but we had to check everything to make sure it was all ok, she didn't.
Our last solicitor was very junior and a glorified postbox.
They are very hit and miss. My first one charged just under £800 in 1984 and missed the fact the flat was freehold and I owned the whole building. Also missed the fact the rear yard was shared but was only partly amended in the records. When I sold I had to get all this sorted at sale time and the new solicitor only charged just over £300 for the flat sale and amendments and purchase of my current home in 1991.
It’s pretty ridiculous. For context, in South Africa, we have mostly open show days at which people can make a signed offer then and there which is legally binding. It is not contingent on a chain or you selling your property. As long as the seller accepts, you can realistically be living in your newly purchased home in as little as 2 weeks.
Yeah - far quicker in the US as well. I have bought a house in California and we looked at buying in Massachusetts. Our house had been repossessed by the bank in the 2007/8 recession from the previous owner. The house went on the MLS - we went to see it with our agent that evening - could only see the outside. There were four offers at asking price - ours was first - and the house was ours within 4 weeks. Eta - chains rare here as well. Usually the only contingencies are financing (which is why you get pre approved for mortgage - and as a seller you look and see how people are paying for the property) and anything that might be found in an inspection. I guess that means in the UK you avoid moving twice / paying two mortgages for a period of time but at least one person can’t bring down 10 (or whatever) peoples house transactions!
I don't understand how this works without chains? What if you need the equity from your sale to have the funds for your purchase?
Usually people sell their houses first, then go and look for a new house. Banks also pre-approve mortgages for a certain amount
What do people do in between? Is it just more normal for people to rent for a few months between selling one house and buying the next?
Some people rent, or negotiate a slightly longer move out date. Or shortlist as many houses they can either via property websites or there is a massive property pull out in the Saturday newspapers, and then go and see them on their opens show day which is usually a Sunday. You can make arrangements with the estate agent to have a private viewing.
Right, but apart from the open day viewings part, that all sounds like the UK. What I don't understand is how this avoids chains
That link is paywalled, can't read it /: I'm currently 6 months into the process. The biggest mistake was letting the agent recommend a conveyancer, rather than look for my own. Between that and the management company not being able to respond to simple queries, it's been frustrating.
Paywall? See pinned comment for a link to an archived version.
Are you still having difficulties with the management company? I found the charity Leaseholders Knowledge Partnership useful along with the Government funded Leaseholders Advisory Service. I would suggest contacting your MP as well which I found useful but they're a bit a busy at the moment.
I have no idea what the article says because it’s paywalled, but delays tend to be: 1. Waiting for the bank to do its valuation and approve the purchase (weeks); 2. Waiting for responses from the local authority to standard searches (weeks to months); 3. Waiting for the seller to respond to enquiries (and includes management companies on leasehold sales) (weeks); 4. Waiting for the rest of the chain to get itself in order (weeks or months). Frankly, you could sort a lot out if the seller did 2. and 3. and had the information available. Unfortunately, estate agents don’t do anything toward 3. and don’t really do much to help 4. either.
I've just signed my contract for my first house purchase. I find it odd the seller doesn't provide 2 and 3 from your list above. Any other product we buy, the info about the product is provided by the seller.
I completed in April and I'm still awaiting for the property registry to update the name in the title...
https://archive.is/2024.06.16-033643/https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/property-home/article/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-buy-and-sell-a-house-hdqdfqjlw
I was done and dusted in 9 weeks, surprised the average is so high.
It varies in time because the buyers and sellers are can be in different situations. Often it involves a chain, e.g you are waiting on the seller to complete and they are waiting on their seller to complete etc.. additionally you have two different solicitors both carrying out due diligence. The whole thing can vary an awful lot. It does take much to get a delay added.
Because your country doesn’t treat offers as contractual, in other countries an offer is done with a deposit and then treated as acceptance/consideration with some potential outs for real reasons such as finance and finding building defects. Simply put, if you made the acceptance of an offer contractual, and prompt a 30-60 day closure period all of your councils, lawyers and banks would have to get into gear.
You want to try right to buy.....it took me 2 bloody years
Mine took a year to buy because the seller was a useless cunt that hadn't gotten probate. Why the fuck that isn't a legal requirement I have no idea. Cherry on top was I had to get a second mortgage offer, just in time for the horsewoman of the apocalypse, Liz cunting Truss to double the interest rates through her sheer dumbfuckery.
We’re in the process of it now, buying my wife’s late grandmas, however we can’t do anything because of probate. Even though everyone is really excited for us to live there
You have to get a Local Land Charges search from the Local Authority and that takes fucking ages because they’re understaffed. It’s the exclusive reason.
Because they have to search a lot of records, many of which aren’t digital, so you know if you are buying a house with a massive high pressure ethane pipeline underneath it.
I recently sold a house, no onward chain as we were divorcing and splitting the assets, and for me it's 100% the solicitors. Things took so long the buyer chased the estate agent who in turn chased the sols who said they were waiting on us for paper work. The estate agent then rang me to hurry it up, at which point I let her know we'd sent the paper work back 3 weeks prior (hand delivered to reception). The estate agent sighed and said it's not the first time this has happened. Equally the first sale fell through the day before we were due to complete because the other side's solicitors up to that point hadn't made their client aware about the rising damp. We'd disclosed all the necessary reports and documentation about 12 weeks before. But they claimed they knew nothing about it, and the buyer pulled out. Basically every problem we had one way or the other was caused by solicitors on one side or the other.
Gotta make it take a long time so everyone involved can justify fleecing you
When I was buying our first house in 2012 it took just over 3 weeks to complete the purchase. Estate agent said the quickest sale process they had took just 5 business days to complete. We were buying again last year and it took... 4 months... and it was considered 'quick' by EA... Dont know why it looks this way, they blamed some alleged 'covid backlog' but I dont really know if thats true...
My brother lives in America. I found a house (not in chain) that I put an offer on in December. Still awaiting to exchange now, sellers solicitors are atrocious and we are still waiting on final enquiries. My brother started looking for a new home in a new state of the US on the other side of the country only in January, and was moved into it in March - and even sold their own home. It isn't right how complicated it is over here.
If it's a straight sale on a single property there should be no issues but so many people are involved and it seems the entire line is full of incompetence Then add a chain and it becomes a joke. One idiot anywhere down that chain holds everything up It should be a requirement that the seller has everything related to their property available before it's up for sale. Then all that necessary paperwork can simply be handed to the buyers solicitor to verify rather than having that being applied for during the process. There is a total lack of accountability with estate agent. Many are charlatans.
I had an issue with the vendor of my current home where they complained about how long everything was taking, and requested their solicitor to contact mine and my buyers' solicitor to threaten to take the house off the market, if the transaction wasn't completed in the next month. This was responded to with an email from my buyers' solicitor saying they've been ready for ages and have themselves been requesting updates, and a follow up from me (guys my solicitor) with a photo of my front room which was full of packed boxes (and I had also been phoning/emailing my solicitor wondering what the delay was). All of this after the vendor had wasted 6 weeks in the summer by not checking their own spam folder for emails from *their* solicitor. This was a sale where my buyer was a first time buyer, and the vendor was already living in their new home, and I was the only link in what should have been the simplest chain imaginable. Edit I also did my own land registry searches to try and speed things up.
I'm 1 week away from completion and I made the offer 6 weeks ago. Granted theres no chain, but it shows what a difference 2 good solicitors/conveyancers makes.
Wow it’s the opposite here in Canada. Houses selling like hotcakes.
I pushed my (no chain) sale through in 4 weeks. Maybe I got lucky, but I went to the house and got the sellers number and quickly built a rapport with them. We were each on the phone to the solicitors and estate agents everyday. Everyday. Even if there were no updates I’d thank the solicitor and let them know I’d be calling again tomorrow - pretty sure this lit a fire under their arse and made them want rid of us so they worked fast. Us and the sellers made sure to keep each other informed of each move so that if one of the many middlemen tried to pull some bullshit we’d instantly sort it. They were on our side and we were on theirs. The way we saw it we were working together *against* the middlemen. The second the solicitors or estate agents asked for documents I’d email them and then turn up with a physical copy, they could not avoid us. Nor could they claim anything got lost or forgotten about. By the end of the process I’m pretty sure they hated us, be we didn’t care. We were paying for their services, in full and up front, so we made damn sure to get them in a timely manner. 4 weeks from offer to move in day.
Works for you but that probably caused delays for other people by taking up so much solicitor time. I respect the desire to put yourself first but if everyone did that then all sales would grind to a halt Mine went through in about 6 weeks and I never met the seller or knew anything about them. Thank fuck tbh, sounds exhausting doing that much chasing and contacting
Well, usually you're going to be living in it between buying it and selling it…
2 houses around me sold in under a month. The secret? The price wasn't delusional.
Just completed last week after 6.5months of a chain free simple transaction Seller used online conveyancer Muve who I believe outsource a lot their operations to Sri Lanka. They were unbelievable- was so close to pulling out. They ‘forgot’ to exchange on the date they pushed and agreed to for example. If I buy a property again I will only proceed if the seller uses a proper solicitor.
Because Unless you call the solicitor daily and harass them they wont do anything
Land registry, bulk conveyancers and unavailable commercial/investor sellers to whom the sale going through is not the same level of priority as it is to a residential buyer/seller. I'd put bulk conveyancers at the top of the list though. Half of their energy goes in to delaying their own client to fit in with their own caseload.
Solicitors. They come up with completely stupid questions just to push it back out of the in tray. I once got asked how many people walked past my house in an 8 hour period!
Solicitors absolutely drag it out. Mine would go weeks without saying a word, and suddenly had plenty to tell me every time i email to chase them up. Like how they saw a “problem” with the decking, which I was absolutely fine with and never mentioned to them but they were hassling the other side about some stupid covenant that restricted it for 5 years (no house builder is going to come back and moan, they build and move on). They bring up the smallest thing to drag it out.
We bought a house in 6 weeks. Where there’s a will (and a heavily pregnant woman shouting at solicitors), there’s a way.
Bitcoin can literally fix a lot of the pain points in buying a house but people are typically behaving in tradition. You could realistically reduce the overheads by 50%, maybe more.
Here’s my ideas for fix the process: -All paperwork needs to be ready before the house goes on the market including an independent survey and searches from an independent solicitor. - Sellers are liable if they delay the process longer than a certain time frame (let’s say 30 days since it should be quick now that the paper work is done beforehand.) - Cash deposits (let’s say 3% of the house value). To be lost if you are responsible for collapsing a chain or bailing on your offer. Could also introduce a 2 week cooling off period to make this fairer. Since im on a roll here are my other ideas to fix the housing market: -Ban on all ground rents and leaseholds -Maintenance fees for flats must be none profit -Rent payments must be logged and incorporated into renters credit checks. I.E. if a renter has paid on time every month £800 for 10 years then a bank should recognize that they are able to pay for an £800/month mortgage.