Sorry to hear this, it’s incredibly stressful. I’ve just been through something similar which was an enormously draining saga. Sit down, loosen your Arab strap, pour yourself a cold one and commiserate…
We were due to complete on our new house a few weeks ago on Monday 13th June. The Thursday before, we get a call to say our buyer wants to pull out - he was a property developer/investor and it turns out he’d been having multiple affairs and his wife was now taking him to the cleaners, suing for future earnings, etc. He’d rather lose his deposit on our house than complete the purchase (he was planning on selling the house on for profit) and give however much of it to his soon-to-be ex.
We faced losing our deposit, which was greater by some way than the deposit we’d be keeping from him. In addition, house prices are still rising in our area and combined with the loss of deposit, it would have meant being unable to move house at all, which we somewhat needed to due to having outgrown our previous home.
Cue: panic mode. As you know there are two weeks post completion date to finally complete before the deal falls through. Now all credit to my wife who is an excellent schmoozer, networker and general do-er, who accomplished much of the below while I sat there stress-wanking myself into a gibbering stupor.
First she managed to calm our emotional and mercurial buyer and got him to agree to sell on our house to another buyer if we could find one. I say mercurial because one day he agreed, the next he’d call up shouting and refusing to sell. She finally got him to commit to selling.
Now to find a buyer. With such short notice we basically had to have a cash buyer to take the house off our original buyer (let’s call him Wanker A). My wife managed to put the word out pretty widely and on Wed 14th (day 3 of our two-week notice period) managed to find a cash buyer, who was willing to pay £20k less than what our buyer had paid, which wasn’t too bad considering. Great. Except our buyer refused to sell for less than what he paid (a familiar sound to denizens of hi-fi fora). She spent the remainder of the week going back and forth between the two negotiating and managing to get them to meet in the middle. It should be noted the estate agent did nothing this whole time.
It’s now Monday 20th - one week left. All we need to do is get Wanker A’s solicitors to pass over all docs to our new buyers. Great. But then Wanker A goes AWOL. We don’t hear from him until Wednesday morning when he suddenly reappears. It turns out he’d been hassling his wife and she got him arrested for harassment so he’d spent some time in custody. He’s now back but a wreck. We spend ages on the phone with him Wednesday morning consoling him, agreeing what a bitch his wife is, saying anything supportive to coax him TF out of his funk and get him back on track. He finally calls his solicitors and tells them to transfer all files. They agree to do it by end of the day.
Great. But EoD comes and goes, and Thursday morning we call up anxiously asking what’s going on and for them to send the files immediately. They promise to send it by EoD. Obviously they don’t.
Friday morning new buyer’s solicitors write an email threatening to sue Wanker A’s solicitors for damages if they don’t send the documents immediately. Wanker A calls them up asking WTF they think they’re playing at. Long story short, docs finally get sent, new buyer’s solicitors and ours are fortunately on top of everything and process the transfer of sale super fast on Friday, hashing everything out between them.
Great. All that’s left is for the people we’re buying from to agree that all their damages were settled (as they’re entitled to, they’d claimed for interest on the loan they’d received on original completion day, extra legal fees from their side, etc.). Despite calling us up on a near daily basis furiously demanding answers as to what’s going on and what we were doing about the situation, and being generally unpleasant (upsetting as the situation wasn’t our fault and we were the only ones working hard to do something about it, but I understand their frustration) they suddenly go quiet. It’s now end of Friday and final completion date is midnight Monday.
Coincidentally Monday is my wife and my anniversary. Sunday night we decide to go out for a meal though frankly neither of us were really in the mood, being exhausted and with such a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the whole thing despite being so close to finishing. During the meal, my wife gets a phone call from the estate agent - he’s angry because his client (Wanker A) is screaming at him saying he’d tried to do a property deal with another investor but the guy had said he’d heard that Wanker A wasn’t completing on his deals and he didn’t want to work with him. He wanted to know what we’d been saying about his client etc. We explained we hadn’t been spreading negative reports but obviously due to having to tell people about our situation, people would have known. We had to calm him down. Couldn’t even go out for a dinner on Sunday night without it being ruined by this prick.
Monday comes. Around midday we finally hear back from our sellers who say they want an extra £350 for council tax payments for the two weeks they’d be living in the house post completion date. We didn’t owe it to them and even if we did it wouldn’t have cost that much, but obviously they were just trying to squeeze us for more at the last minute. Obviously we paid and frankly were grateful they didn’t ask for more. We finally complete at 4pm. Our sellers told us to come and get the key from them. They were currently in another house about a 15 min drive away. They left it under their doormat and their only communication post completion was to message saying ‘Get it from under the mat’. A shame that what should have been a moment of relief and congratulations all round was spoiled by these people. I told my wife she should have rung on their door and said she couldn’t find the key and made them bend down to root around and pick it up, just to match their pettiness, but she’s a better person than I.
So we finally made it! But that was the most awful experience I’ve had in a long time, being pushed around by two tossers (original buyer and then our sellers) and having to just suck it up. Oh, and the humiliation of having to go out whoring ourselves to every semi-wealthy person we knew to see if they, or someone they knew, or someone they knew who might know, would want to cash buy our house.
CUNTS!!