House contracts exchanged…no going back!

Earlier this week it was decided that the exchange and completion would take place on the same day (tomorrow). However my very good and organised solicitor rang and said that the vendor had requested an exchange today and completion tomorrow, as my solicitors were sure that they could do this without difficulty I happily agreed.

So now neither of us can back out of the deal without incurring huge costs. So its going to be a busy couple of weeks as we have to pack up and move 2 houses all next weekend as the properties we currently live in have been let from the beginning of February so that’s our big deadline. This wouldn’t ordinarily be a problem but neither of us can take time off work right now so with everything on our side we’ll be moved and connected to the internet again in no time!

It will prove interesting to find out how long getting broadband is going to take since I haven’t booked it in yet! Must put that on tomorrows to do list.

So tomorrow we complete and then we can pick up the keys from 8.15am on saturday I can hardly wait!

Mortgage completion date.

At long last we have a completion date for the purchase of our property As i expected completing for last friday was just too short a timescale for the logistics of transferring the money etc. So after a bit of discussion with our solicitor we have settled on this coming Friday.

All being well we will exchange on thursday and then complete on friday which then just leaves us to collect the keys on saturday and get started on cleaning!

We are very lucky in that we don’t need to move out of our current homes immediately so we can take a week to clean the property and check everything is working and if it isn’t get on with fixing it before we fill the house up with our stuff!

Mortgage, contract etc…

On friday I got home from work to find that the solicitor had sent through the final contract etc for signing. It turns out that way back in 1989 planning permission was sought for converting the house into a 1 bed flat and a 2 bed maisonette although there were some conditions to the planning application, as the conversion never took place I suspect the conditions were to do with parking as the house has double yellow lines directly outside so no parking there, plus the front garden is not big enough to turn into a driveway to get the car off the main road. Anyway we don’t want to convert so this isn’t a concern for us.

In the very impressive pack of information sent to us we had full details of the searches carried out on the property and although I have bought property before I have never seen such a full load of information before. We had to sign a stamp duty transfer form authorising the solicitor to pay the stamp duty (stamp duty land tax is payable on most properties over £120k and is 1% up to £250k although properties in some areas are stamp duty exempt the estate agent will certainly let you know if that is the case with the property you are interested in), the mortgage title deed, the contract and a buildings insurance form stating what insurance cover we have and who with and when it starts. The contract and title deed signatures had to be witnessed by a non family member. So over the weekend we got everything signed and then yesterday I organised the buildings insurance to start from this friday (well you can’t accuse me of not being optimistic!).

All being well we will exchange and complete this friday although I think this may be a little to quick for the solicitors to organise the transfer of funds etc so I expect it to next week that it actually happens….I can hardly wait

The buildings insurance is always a little annoying because you have to pay for buildings and contents insurance before you even own the building! Anyway there is no way around this so although we could have started the insurance from next week and possibly avoided paying for a week of insurance on a property we don’t own we decided it was worth paying that to potentially get the house for this weekend. Fingers crossed now

New mortgage offer…

Well now that the holiday season is over and most people are back at work it was time to make calls and see if we were any nearer to exchanging and completing on our property. I spoke with the solicitor to find out what was happening regarding the local searches and they explained that they were clarifying that the searches were on the correct property as details didn’t match up, they hope to have news by the end of this week…

Then I called the estate agents to find out what was happening regarding the damp report I requested almost a month ago. Apparently the damp treatment company are still on holiday (lucky them!) until next monday so I won’t be getting anything before then I guess!

However, we did have a fabulous late christmas gift in the form of a new mortgage offer…as you know the offer of the mortgage was made subject to various work being carried out and so we asked them to clarify exactly what was required from us to get the £5k retention back. After much deliberation they never actually answered the question but just reissued the offer without a retention this is of course the best possible outcome for us and well worth waiting a couple of weeks for, boy am I glad I asked!

So if in any doubt when you get a mortgage offer with a cash retention which will only be released on completion ask lots of questions and you never know it might be your lucky day and you too will have the mortgage company go ‘oh alright then you can have all the money after all’.