Today I hit new lows of stress and panic. I’ts been a fairly hectic few months, not helped by the fact that we own a flat in London which we currently rent out. When we left London, selling the flat would have meant we lost loads of money as the market was so unstable. So we rented up in Yorkshire, and rented our flat out.
I won’t go into details, but due to a leaky bathroom, a neighbour in the flat below whose idea of diplomacy would put Pol Pot up for the Nobel peace prize in comparison, and the bastard thieving nature of insurance companies, we decided to sell the flat and be shot of the whole worrying package.
So this brings me on to the point of this post. It’s a simple sale. No chain – our buyers currently rent, and we’re not buying another place now. They were preapproved for a mortgage, the surveys went through all tickety-boo. So why are we now in a position where our tenants are moving out in just under 3 weeks and we have no end in sight?
Is there a secret conveyancers’ code? Our friends just went through a similar thing where the buyer’s solicitors kept giving absurd advice on the leasehold of the property, and taking this as a cautionary tale, we accepted our buyers’ much reduced offer subject to them taking the lease on as it stands. We’d protect ourselves by making the sale as simple as possible, we thought. Well, that’s out of the fucking water. We’ve been asked for all sorts of information – some of which we can get, some of which we can’t. The freeholder won’t provide some of it – he has no legal responsibility to do so, and we’re not obliged to either. But our buyers conveyancers are insisting on it. We’re now at an impasse where they want some info from us, we can’t get it, and no one will budge. So what happens now? No one seems to know.
What I do know is that every day about 3 hours are taken up with endless and pointless phone calls which seem to cause no shift in the process. I am trying to run a business and instead am spending my time speaking to my estate agent who is as bemused as I am about the whole process.
In the meantime, our tenants, given 2 months notice, decided to complain about us and to threaten us with legal action. We never got to the bottom of the basis for this, but they dropped it when they realised there was nothing in the law which catered for taking people to court for serving legal notice in the correct legal manner.
I am sorry – this is a rant-y and self interested post. But I do think the question needs asking. What do conveyancers actually do? Every piece of information etc that has been needed, I have chased up and eventually delivered. The solicitor – or more usually his secretary – speaks to me about once a week to let me know that the buyer’s solicitor has raised another concern.
What a load of toot, as Lord Sugar would say.
