quick help please! santander

[reelist]

Hi,

i'm new here and arrived because i'm a first time buyer (read: completely new to buying property!) midway through a purchase and may have hit a potentially deal breaking stumbling block.

the story so far is that i've payed a holding fee on a new build property. at the time i had an AIP with santander and didnt see much difficulty in getting it approved. I appointed local solicitors who were on the santander panel and got them working on the searches etc straight away. this was approximately 3 weeks ago.

today i have discovered (via my mortgage broker) that santander will only allow select solicitors to represent them. this only came about today as the mortgage had finally been approved. now this causes numerous issues.

firstly my current solicitor has been working away on my behalf and i'll have to incur that cost.

secondly by changing solicitors at such a late date (exchange is less than 2 week from now) will, i expect, push the exchange date back which could lead to the property being put back on the market.

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my first question is, has anyone heard of santander being so fussy about solicitors? the last thing i want to do now is switch. i get the sneaking feeling that its the broker trying to pull a fast one but as part of the deal, santander are supposedly offering to pay the solicitors fees, so i dont see what he has to gain.

my first preference is to stay the course and stick with my current solicitor (even if it proves more costly) as it'll eliminate the risk of me losing the property alltogether. but in the event i do have to switch, has anyone had experience in doing this with new builds and pushing back the exchange date? how flexible are they likely to be?

[Richard Webster]

Get your present solicitors to contact Santander and ask why they are not being instructed.

Sometimes it is a silly glitch like the broker got the solicitor's name slightly wrong when he filled in the forms so Santander don't recognise the name of the firm on their panel list. This sort of thing has happened to me when a broker has used the letters from my logo (RW&CO) rather than the full name of the firm and a lender hasn't found it. A quick telephone call quoting the panel number should sort out that kind of thing.