House sale fallen through 3 times

[leriloo]

I could really do with someones advice please :-)

We put our 2 bed Edwardian terraced house on the market in July for 195k. Within a week we sold it for 192k. Found a property we liked and had our offer accepted. Straight away our buyer started being awkward, he came and had a look a further 3 or 4 times, but wouldn't come when were available. The estate agents had a terrible time getting hold of him and he wouldn't answer any questions about whether he had a mortgage in place. He had a survey done on our house and slight damp was flagged up in the dining room. We have a 30 year warranty with Dampco (still got 20 years left), but that wasn't good enough for him. We got Dampco back and they said it was absolutely fine and that damp metres aren't really reliable. They wrote us a report which we passed on to our buyer, then 2 days later he came back and said "I just can't be bothered any more" and pulled out - we were 3 weeks away from exchanging. We couldn't get any further info out of him. We had meanwhile paid for a survey on the house we were buying - so lost the house and the money on the survey.

Anyway, it was now September and as we didn't feel that our estate agents helped much, we swapped to someone else. We had about 3 viewings a week with our new agents and at the end of Nov, we had a another offer (190k). We accepted, but again the buyer was awkward. She all of a sudden decided that as we were at the bottom of a small hill there was a chance that rainwater could flow down the hill and flood the house! Even though there was no evidence and the environment agency said the was no chance of it happening. So, 2 weeks in she pulled out.

We didn't get many viewings before Xmas, but in the new year loads of people showed interest. 3 Weeks ago I showed a lady around who seemed very interested. She came on the friday and looked around for an hour, then came on the saturday with a friend for another hour. Monday morning she put in an offer of 180k, which we refused. We managed to get her up to 187k. From then on we had contact from her nearly every day asking questions such as: where's the stop cock!

We found a house we liked and had our offer accepted, they wouldn't take it off the market until we had a survey done. So we instructed it and it was done last Friday.

Meanwhile our buyer had the survey done on our house. When the surveyor came round I tried to show him the Dampco report but he wasn't interested. He was very rude and wouldn't tell me anything.

Our buyer asked to come and view the house again and turned up on Sunday with half her family and was here for nearly 2 hours. They all loved the house and she was saying how it was fate that she had found it and how happy she was.

And then on Tuesday we had a call to say she had pulled out after seeing the survey. She won't tell us what was in it, she won't negotiate and she won't sell it to us. We managed to get out of our estate agent that she was worried about the (non-existant) damp, the fact that in the next 5-10 the small flat roof MAY need replacing. And apparantly somewhere (which we can't find) there is evidence of old woodworm, but it's not there now.

We are absolutely stumped now as to what to do. We are thinking that if 2 people pulled out over the survey it will happen again. If we knew what the problems were we could fix them. We are out of pocket for 2 surveys on other houses now, plus mortgage fees and solicitors fees and are running out of money.

Any advice would be most appreciated and sorry to go on!

[brian]

It's a tough market - a buyer's market - so even if someone likes a house, there are usually a lot of others available so it could be a case of the house with least issues is more likely to sell than one with some perceived issues.

Rather than talk to Dampco about the damp problem, it might be worth having a chat with a surveyor over basics, and even consider getting them around (presuming you haven't a survey in place) in order to get an idea of what is actually being flagged up and causing problems. It may or may not be the case that the existing (small) damp problem needs looking at.

2c.