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I'm in a similar boat. Our offer was accepted at the beginning of September and the vendor's solicitor is only just now responding to enquiries that were raised in October. Our own solicitor is also rubbish, which is compounding things - why did we only just find out that their enquiries from Oct. hadn't been responded to?!
Our next step is going to be to imply that we're thinking about pulling out from the deal if they delay any longer, and hopefully that will hurry them along as they are part of an onward chain.
jackincaves-
That's not good. But sounds like a plan.
We are lucky in that our solicitor is forum recommended, clearly very hard working and efficient. She can't understand why it's taking them so long, but I'm sure @rogan is right and other less good solicitors have taken on more than they can chew with the stamp duty deadline approaching.
It's particularly frustrating because we're the only link in the chain and we have a very 'motivated' buyer who is paying cash and offered £30k over asking, but her offer is conditional on March completion.
I'm not kidding myself that we'll find a buyer/offer like that again, and our sale is all going fine, so if it comes down to it we'll move out and put our stuff in storage. But I think if that happens our opening position should be 'your solicitors are shit so we're going to knock £15k off our offer for stamp duty and £Xk in storage and relocation costs'.
AIBU? The sellers aren't going to get an offer like ours now and they'd be back to square one too. Plus they'll have an inheritance tax bill to pay.
Fox
Other people's conveyancing solicitors... FFS.
Our buyer's solicitors are really on it but our vendor's haven't managed to get the grant of probate to our solicitors yet despite it being granted two and a half weeks ago. They haven't answered our solicitor's enquiries yet either and some go all the way back to December.
Our solicitor suggested being put into an email chain with their agent and she's doing a good job of going into battle, but we need the vendor's to put pressure on their solicitor.
If we don't meet the stamp duty deadline we're going to lose £15k because of their crap solicitors and obviously I don't see why we should pick that up, so if things don't get better in a few days I will be asking the agent to relay that thought to the vendor.
Is there anything else we can do?