We agreed sale of our house at start of September, we then packed up, put our stuff in storage and got on the ferry to Santander on 2nd Oct to live near daughter in Portugal.
Our ‘buyers’ a young couple were selling their flat to a cash buyer and that’s it, no real chain as such.
We are still waiting for the paper pushers to finish doing their thing!
It’s down to the management company of the flats being slow responding to requests.
The UK system is so ridiculous! Here in Portugal you agree sale and place a 10% deposit (buyer and seller), if either pull out after sale is agreed deposit is forfeited.

Hope its not om formerly pev…l you re dealing with, true shockers, they charge for everything.

Markets turning I m afraid, I m looking to buy in uk and a fair few have come back for sale, I think lenders are tightening criteria and, or, buyers are getting cold feet.

I sold a Spanish property last year, money in the bank 2 weeks after offer accepted. I actually blew out the first buyer as he tried to gazunder me, sold it for more to someone else.

Good luck btw

Here in the England/Wales/NI if you sign contracts to exchange and don’t complete you also lose your 10% deposit. It’s just exchange contracts to completion is compressed timewise

Less to do with the system and more to do with the management company/living in flats.
That’s one of the reasons I would never buy a flat (there are many more).
Unfortunately with the cladding issue a lot of young people (who were forced to buying flats as they’d been priced out of houses) are now trapped.
How are you able to live in Portugal full time – what’s the situation post-Brexit? Do you have an Irish passport or something? My mother’s Irish and I’m thinking of applying for one, will make the queues at airports more bearable plus I wouldn’t mind living in Italy or Croatia for a while.

I had an offer accepted in Oct and moved this weekend. 3 of us in the chain. My solicitors were sh1t and easily added 4, maybe 6 weeks to the process.

Solicitors literally don’t seem to do anything off their own bat. I’m helping my folks sell up at the moment – no chain either side; we had a sale fall through last summer so much of our legals were already in place. Buyer’s end send things by post, FFS. So we get lots of examples of things crossing in the post.

Stamp duty window hasn’t helped due to workload but I also understand the buyer impressed on his solicitor that they wanted to move before the window ended, “but asap”. So what did their solicitor do? Nothing at all for a whole 5-6 weeks. On being chased, they then announced that end March was their plan, but they could do end Feb.

Lazy feckers. It won’t be down just to the management company – it’ll be a combination of factors plus buyer and vendor not chasing hard enough (not that you should have to!)

Solicitors literally don’t seem to do anything off their own bat.

It feels like you have to manage them like a employee who was on their last warning. The inefficiencies and techniques they employ are so antiquated its a joke. Not to mention the quality of the report that is produced. I’ve seen better gcse projects.

Like everything, you get what you pay for. If you pay for the cheapest conveyancer then you will get a crap service.

Solicitors literally don’t seem to do anything off their own bat.

It feels like you have to manage them like a employee who was on their last warning. The inefficiencies and techniques they employ are so antiquated its a joke. Not to mention the quality of the report that is produced. I’ve seen better gcse projects.

They’re a nightmare aren’t they.

It’s an industry ripe for ‘disruption’.

We moved over here in Oct, so now have Portuguese residency. Hoping to return to UK soon to sell the car and then fly back….. but that is in the hands of Johnson for now!

Our solicitor is a friend and has been pushing hard, the issue is more the risk of not having any guarantee and just not being able to get on and fully settle. Obviously we knew it was a risk and in some ways the Covid restrictions help in that we are here for now and that’s that. Just sit back and enjoy the improving weather I guess.

They’re a nightmare aren’t they.

It’s an industry ripe for ‘disruption’.

It really isn’t. It’s so highly regulated that you can barely fart without a regulator crashing down on you, and all of the low cost entrants were themselves ‘disruptors’ who realised without massive volume it’s impossible to make money, and with massive volume you get poor service. There are already conveyancing warehouses using AI/whatever the latest buzzword is etc and have been for some time.

oh tell me about it. We sold our house in bristol in September. The offer we accepted was from someone that was very finanically stable and had a lot of money for a deposit. Turns out through the process they changed their mind and got 2 mortgages arranged. 1 for the house as a buy to let and then a remortgage of their property. This slowed the whole process somewhat and the place we were buying were getting very annoyed that things were taking so long

In the end the developers gave us an ultimatum date to exchange otherwise it was going back on the market. Funnyily enough this made things go a bit quicker.

We also moved out before exchanging on the property but this was due to the buyer wanting to exchange and complete on the same day (they wanted no risk of falling through after exchange) Was a bit of a gamble but thankfully paid off

We have heard mortgage lenders are getting more stringent and they valued our property and the remortgage property as the houses in our area are all going over asking price

It feels like you have to manage them like a employee who was on their last warning. The inefficiencies and techniques they employ are so antiquated its a joke

This x1000 I get the impression they just take on too much work. I’ve never heard a good word about anyones conveyancing process

How much is the leal side to buying/selling? @£2500? Most of that is cost of searches/mortgage etc, so the solicitors firm is getting £5-600 tops. Theres a lot of work to do for that cash……

Local government searches are taking twice the normal time. Offices are closed with people WFH. Lots of legal stuff has to be posted. Post is taking longer at the moment.

I’m no defender of rubbish conveyancers, but you get what you pay for and we are in a pandemic.

It feels like you have to manage them like a employee who was on their last warning.

20 odd years ago when I bought my house I ended up having to speak to both my solicitor and the seller’s to get them to do anything. Each would be ‘waiting on the other’. The seller’s was a bit put out by me calling him, but eventually agreed to tell me what he was waiting for (his own arse to meld itself to his seat). Was quite an eye opener into just how shockingly bad an industry could be….

Once all is done and dusted the company in question will be getting both barrels! It’s laughable looking at service promises on their website!

Oh, I don’t think there’s an actual cladding issue with the flat as it’s two storey, brick built house style flat in a small mixed type estate.

The chap who did my last 2 uk purchases is….in jail. He got 2 years for embezzlement of client funds, only stole 20k or something similar but it was over a few thefts so seen as a repeat offender.

We nearly rumbled him, on 1 occasion he wanted a sum paying to an account. He was challenged that that account was not a client account, blah blah excuses. I kick myself now that we didn’t report him.

Pretty much unemployable post prison, he was actually very good at his job but clearly thought he should be paid more.

Sorry slight aside, but be careful transferring any money.

From my recent moving experience, I found it was very much a case of the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If I didn’t hear something from at least someone daily then I was on the phone. My solicitor told me at one point that I was a priority because she knew I was “keen to get things moving” – damn right she did. I moved back in November and I have no doubts that if I rang today going “hi Suzanne, it’s Alan” she would have no question as to who she was talking with.

We agreed to sell our house nearly a year ago, the week before the lockdown. Fortunately, the survey was done quickly but then it just ground to a halt. They brought in a
COVID rule to insist on a simultaneous exchange and completion because there was a fear that someone would contract and die from COVID in-between. As we were selling to move into rented in Scotland, we managed to get a week delay between the two, but our solicitor insisted we sign a letter that we were going against her instruction. There was a while that it looked like the whole thing would run into the sand because the estate agents and solicitors were just sitting in their ar$es waiting for something to happen – it was only us forcing decisions on dates etc that made it happen.
We’ve now bought a plot of land in Scotland and having a house built – that was an incredibly slow process and even now, months later the final paperwork hasn’t come through.

i have bought and sold 4 times now (sold 3) each conveyance has been more arduous, tedious and convoluted than the last. cant imagine how frustrating it must be at the moment! our next door neighbours sold their house in Septemeber but still no sign of moving. i have a friend who is a solicitor who gave up her job due to the stresses and abuse she was on the receiving end of because of this stamp duty window.

imagine missing out by one day because your solicitor was dragging their heels and you got a 30k tax bill!!

Its a gigantic mess of a process that could easily be cleaned up. 90% of the work could be done by sellers before something goes on the market – a perfectly sound approach that the tories backed out of implementing because of their friends in the industry.

Looks like the exchange is now sorted and completion on Thursday! What an epic marathon.

Good news Moe. Hope it goes through ok.

Someone we know who is selling just found out that the property isn’t registered with the Land Registry – you can search for it on the LR website, but there are no deeds or anything else associated with it. Quite bizarre really – 6 weeks and £190 to sort. Good job about the stamp duty window being extended otherwise he’d have lost his buyer. I’m just wondering why that sort of thing wasn’t discovered sooner.

Bit of a giggle this morning when our solicitor phoned to check the price, the buyers solicitor hadn’t noticed that the documentation had the original asking price on it not the agreed price (5k less). No biggie but a bit of egg on the face there!

Anyone have experiences of best way transferring the money out of UK?

Rich_s
Full Member
Good news Moe. Hope it goes through ok.

Someone we know who is selling just found out that the property isn’t registered with the Land Registry – you can search for it on the LR website, but there are no deeds or anything else associated with it. Quite bizarre really – 6 weeks and £190 to sort. Good job about the stamp duty window being extended otherwise he’d have lost his buyer. I’m just wondering why that sort of thing wasn’t discovered sooner.

Nothing nefarious there – before 19971990 there was no requirement to register the title at the LR, so evidence of title was in the deeds. A lot of land has been registered since then, but there’s still some which hasn’t.

When it’s registered the LR enters all the relevant information from the deeds so the actual pieces of paper become to all intents and purposes irrelevant (though often the LR doesn’t include relevant information which can cause problems decades down the line).

Since 19971990 or so it’s been compulsory to register the title of unregistered land at each conveyance. Not sure why your mate had to register it before the sale – usually the buyer’s solicitor would deal with registration.

Edit: 1990 not 1997

Thanks @Jakester I’ll pass that on.

I’m not convinced you do get what you pay for with solicitors… we have just changed solicitors at our vendors insistance, the previous sale (which fell through, but nothing to do with solicitors) was using my home move – the cheapest we could find and they were very efficient.

Now using a local well recommended company at nearly twice the price… they have done nothing without chasing, and are constantly trying to blame others for the delays… e.g. “The searches are delayed”… when I see a copy they were completed 2 weeks ago… “We haven’t received your mortgage details from the broker”… “its not the portal and has been since the day it was approved, 3 weeks ago”. FFS.

The system sucks, there has to be a better way.

Just to say my solicitor is cheap, efficient and most importantly communicates in plain english

Yes, also have to agree, my solicitor has been fantastic, though he is a friend of many years. E-mails anytime between 7.45am & 8.00pm, been on the ball for the whole process.

Feel a bit sorry for the buyers as they’ve been stuck in their flat, knowing that the property they’ve bought sits empty for six months, then moving day finally arrives gives you 50mph winds! 🙄

Six months of all are lives on hold (to a degree) waiting for pen pushers!