Where do we stand

[wanttomove]

Hi to cut a long story short, we are ready to exchange on both our sell and purchase....we were given a date of 5/08 to move in. We were due to exchange today. I got a phone call from my solicitor to tell me that the people in Newcastle were not ready.....what people in Newcastle? As far as I knew the people selling us the house were chain free.... we are in Portsmouth. I am very confused.....apparenytly the solicitors's buyer knew nothing about it until yesterday? This all sound dodgy to me.. Solicitor told me we should be ready to exchange on wednesday...and move on 12/08. I don't trust anything she says anymore. I also found out from our estate agent that my buyer's mortgage offer expires on 12/08.....solicitor didn't tell me about that either..where do I stand? Aren't they obliged to tell us about the chain? We are considering withdrawing from the purchase as someone is not honest and carrying on with our sell.....I have given my solicitor the ultimatum. If we don't exchange on wednesday we are pulling out of the purchase of our hous. I don't know what else I can do I don't want to lose my buyer

[Richard Webster]

Problem is that if U are buying from V and V is buying from W, as it gets further from U the communication breaks down. It happens the other way too. Solicitors don't get told details of the chain above and below.

Estate agents tend to give out information that they get from other agents and don't continually update it. So people can be told their seller's seller isn't buying anything and that may be true when it is told but they change their minds and that information doesn't filter down. This sort of thing happens all the time and your solicitor should have warned you not to make assumptions about when things would happen for this kind of reason. See Property Conveyancing Jargon Buster - Assumptions and Exchange of Contracts

Chains are a major problem. All we can do at the moment is warn people about the problem so they don't make too many assumptions about when things will happen.

The last Government thought HIPs were the great panacea for English Conveyancing - they shoudl have done something about informaiton flow through chains. The Land Registry relaised this was an issue and tried to pioneer an electronic chain matrix where the information about how far everyon ehad got would be held centrally but they couldn't continue with it because of cuts etc.

[wanttomove]

Hi Mr Webster, thanks for your reply. You are 100% right this is what happened. We saw our estate agent this morning and apparently the extra person in the chain should be ready to exchange on Wednesday. I am not angry with my solicitor anymore now that I understand. We lost a sell last year so I guess we are nervous. We have never been buyers and sellers, this is the first time for us being in a chain so we just were not aware such a thing could happen. Thanks for explaining, I feel much happier now. Let's hope all goes well from now....

[New Homes Expert]

Ah the many pitfalls of the chain ridden trasaction!
new homes dont have chains and you can even part exchange your home too.

[wanttomove]

Ok, it's Friday and exchange still hasn't happened. I am sick with worry now. What do we do? Pull out of our purchase before we lose our buyer? I am sooo fed up. I had no phone call from either solicitor or estate agent. It's always up to us to chase them. How long do mining searches take I wonder? Apparently this is what we are waiting for....