In this month’s article, our sale progressor Lyndsay has given her top tips for a smooth sale. So here’s our summary.
Tip 1 – Have the right people on your side
Firstly, and so importantly, it’s choosing the right people working for you.
If you’ve chosen us as your agent, big tick in the box straight away! And extremely importantly, it’s the solicitor that you choose. This can really make or break your experience. A cheaper, online solicitor can seem like a great idea, however, if they’re cheaper there’s usually a reason for that!
With solicitors, you really get what you pay for. Bad solicitors mean a higher chance of falling through due to less communication and less pro activeness, causing a knock-on effect for everyone else involved.
We do have our own recommended solicitors, and this is because we deal with and are witness to the conveyancing process every day, so we know which solicitors are great and which are on the naughty list!
Even if you don’t use a solicitor directly recommended by us, the next best thing is using someone who’s been recommended by a friend or family member, or one that you’ve had a good experience with yourself in the past.
Once the process begins and you’re potentially 8 weeks through and begin experiencing problems with your solicitor, it’s not easy to back out or change solicitors without incurring charges. Also, the delay caused may be a risk factor of the chain collapsing.
If you’re unsure, trust us to guide you, as we deal with many solicitors on a daily basis.
Mortgage brokers are also included in choosing the right people! (we have a fantastic one that we can recommend too!) They can help find the right mortgage for you quickly and easily and are truly on your side, shopping the market to find you the very best deal.
Going direct to a bank can often mean less communication and they can only offer you their own deal, whereas the broker can look at numerous lenders and deals.
Your mortgage broker will also be one of the people pushing for updates and helping things through. They’ll save you money and communicate with us too. (A bank won’t do this!)
Tip 2 – Be proactive
From the buyers perspective, when you make an offer on a home, your agent will ask you for a variety of documents to qualify you as a buyer, such as your ID, proof of deposit funds, a copy of your mortgage in principle etc. Be proactive, get those documents over to us! A property can’t be marked as sold until we’ve got everything we need. In that time, viewings could still be taking place and someone else could come along and make an offer!
Once the sale is agreed, you’ve sent in all your documents and the house is marked as sold, the buyers and sellers’ solicitor will request initial documents from their clients. Complete these initial forms asap! Nothing will be happening until these documents are complete and sent back to your solicitor and initial checks carried out.
This is particularly important on the seller’s side. Sellers, completing your documents quickly and effectively gives your solicitor the ability to send something over to your buyer’s solicitor called a ‘draft contract pack’. Until this is sent, nothing is happening!
This is what gets the process started and gives the buyers side the ability to order searches, which can take some time to come back. Some buyer’s solicitors will order searches prior to receipt of the draft contract pack, but not many.
So, the quicker you are, the quicker the solicitors can do what they need to do. Further down the line there will be further enquiries to answer too, so keep an eye out for these and make sure to jump into action when these arrive too!
Tip 3 - Be realistic
Sometimes, people say they’ve been told by their solicitors, or their friend who’s a mortgage broker, or Wendy down the street who moved in a few weeks ago, that their house sale could complete in 6 weeks!
Unfortunately, for various reasons, nobody really knows exactly how long the conveyancing process will take.
There are multiple solicitors often involved in the chain, not just your own. So although your solicitor may be able to get your side of things done nice and fast, which is great, not all solicitors and their customers move at the same pace. Furthermore, searches can take a varying amount of time to come back too. There’s also no knowing what enquiries will come up, or even what issues may arise in surveys etc.
Until you start peeling back the layers, you never truly know what’s going to be involved or how long those issues may take to resolve. Some of these answers can be required to come from a third party such as a management company, builder or the council, again, taking varying amounts of time.
An important thing to bear in mind too, is that if it’s taken some time for people in the chain to find and secure their onward purchases, those solicitors and purchases inevitably won’t be as far down the line as your own, and patience will be needed whilst these progress.
Being flexible as well as realistic where possible helps too, as people can sometimes want something to complete by a certain date or within a certain week, but this isn’t always possible for the various reasons mentioned.
Putting on this sort of pressure can cause unnecessary stress for everyone involved, particularly if people use the approach of threatening to pull out of the sale if things don’t happen by a certain time. Quite often, delays are unintentional and sometimes unavoidable or circumstantial, so using these threats and making multiple calls/messages daily can cause stress and ill will.
From our perspective and helping to chase, it’s really all about balance. Chasing the same solicitor every day isn’t at all helpful and it doesn’t help things get done, however not chasing at all might mean some things don’t get done at all, so it’s about finding that perfect balance where we help and don’t hinder!
We hope you enjoyed reading and found this helpful!
