Back to Selling Privately 1 & 2 - Valuing Property and Arranging HIP
Back to Selling Privately 3 - Finding a Buyer who can proceed
4. Making Sure the Transaction goes through.
This is the most difficult bit. Buyers may not get their mortgages, or their buyer might not do so, or somebody else in the chain may pull out. If you are buying another property, there may be a problem in the chain above your seller.
Things change...
Also, remember that things change. For instance, a date may have been suggested for moving 6 weeks beforehand, and you may be happily proceeding towards a completion on that date. but someone else in the chain cannot now achieve that because of some delay or the other - you won't get told - you have to keep checking! You may even ring all the people in the chain and they will all say they are happy with the date. Did they check with their solicitors if it was still possible though...?? You then need to check periodically that this information hasn't changed, perhaps because someone has fallen out of the chain and hasn't yet been replaced!
Continuously checking the chain...
You will have your solicitor to help you, but none of us have the time to spend carrying out detailed checks of chains, etc. At Richard Webster & Co, we try to do this as much as we reasonably can, because we offer a personal service, and are not stuck in an industrial unit somewhere doing "volume conveyancing". Even so, we cannot continuously check every link of every chain our clients are involved in. A good estate agent should be able to do this and have much more time to do it - they also get paid much more than we do! If you are not using an estate agent, you will need to find out as much as possible about the chain yourself and ask your solicitor to do the same.
You will have to balance the cost saving against the possible benefits of having someone following up and checking things for you to make sure the transaction goes through. Most agents don't get paid if the sale doesn't exchange and complete, so they have a vested interest in making it happen!
With ever increasing use of the internet it may be that the traditional estate agent with a local office will begin to fade and some of the traditional services in checking chains etc will not be there in the future. Certainly some agents do not have much idea even now about what to do to check progress and make sure things happen - they think all they have to do is show people round houses and then their job ends - but it doesn't...
Go to the page about Choosing an Estate Agent
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