Owning your own home

our neighbours are moving out today, with no stuff in it, you can hear so much more noise.

we must be so loud to our neighbours as we have minimal soft furnishings and stuff.

hope our new neighbour coming tomorrow has lots of stuff...

Crosspost from the gardening thread:

Does anyone have recommendations for someone based southeast who does garden work? We've been messed about by a company and now we need someone else to come finish the job.

We need a drainage layer of type one and shingle on top of clay, tiles laid, a small wall built and a small staircase created.

Ta!

Nationwide are annoying with their multiple accounts.
I’ve had clients who have had 13 nationwide sub accounts, and there is no overriding main account number which encompasses them all.

It’s possible that they sent all the money onto one account number (though I assume they would have got a redemption statement for all of them)

Other than there being a direct debit for Nationwide ongoing, with a payment due next month?
You don’t want to be cancelling or not paying mortgage the lender thinks you still have.

And if you paid the payment, you still have to contact the bank to get the additional money and overpaid interest back...

We've just used Rene from Ground Team - https://groundteam.co.uk for a very big retiling patio area job including rebuilding steps and retaining walls and laying drainage. His team - Vlad and Igor - are really nice. Rene can be a bit excitable, but overall they were really good.

Labourer worked all day yesterday and is still going today stripping the shitty wood chip off the walls. Plasterer arrived today to start speeding things up. He's raised some totally reasonable extra work that is a good idea so will be a bit longer and slightly more expensive, but it was 40% cheaper than the other quote I had anyway.

I'll wait until they are finished before I start recommending them as they are a new firm, but so far so good. The labourer cracked on with minimal noise/disruption, the plasterer is really friendly and seems diligent. The builder/co-owner has been great with comms so far too, despite being snowed under with other jobs.

Almost nothing to do with me except for the fact I'm paying two mortgages!

I guess I could just cancel the direct debit but I can't think that would be good for my perfect credit rating (lol).

You must be right though because the building society and the solicitors don't seem too bothered about it :P

It’s possible that they sent all the money onto one account number

Yeah me and the Nationwide customer service lady this morning wondered about that. But no money has hit any of our four mortgages (hangover from building work going way over budget). Her best guess is that the solicitors forgot to put the account numbers in the payment references...

I'm trying to think of it all as numbers which don't really mean anything (like the opposite of that These New Puritans song). Which is basically what house buying with a mortgage is anyway. But I am looking forward to having one mortgage, not five.

The difference you get when working with good trades people is night and day - makes it actually almost enjoyable. Hope it carries on like this

Hope it carries on like this

You and me both! Could go either way tomorrow when the gaffer visits to see how they're getting on and tell me the extra costs/timeframe.

We withdrew from purchase of a flat yesterday as a house we’d previously tried to buy, unexpectedly came back on and accepted our offer this time round.
Understandably the sellers of the flat aren’t happy. More surprisingly they’ve asked us to pay for their solicitor’s fees.
Morally they may have a case but legally am I right to think they just have to suck it up like we did when our previous purchases and sale fell through?
(We’re checking with our solicitor just in case).

Yes.

Thanks.
They’re selling through one of the cheapo online Estate Agencies so you end up dealing with the seller direct which makes things like this so much harder.

That sucks.

It's an unfortunate part of the game. Comes out in the wash though in the end. They'll probably sell the place for more or something silly.

A cause close to my heart:

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/577436

Hahhhhhhh

Signed.

I hate the trend for artificial grass, or concreting over lawns, and I love butterflies and hedgehogs.

I'm assuming you were serious about it rather than aiming it as a barb or finding it funny - but I definitely took it as such and think it's a good idea!

Having our offer accepted, being chain free plus the vendor being chain free we proceeded with all the legal process and many thousands already spent. A few days ago my solicitor emailed me to say the seller doesn't actually own the house! It belongs to his deceased father and that the son has applied for probate at the beginning of the year. So no timeframe on completion! Im naturally annoyed that we are in a hold up and that we may be delayed past the stamp duty holiday and if so need to fork out an additional 15K which I really don't want to be spending.

Do I let the proceedings continue to and then mention that I'll be renegotiating a new offer if delayed beyond the stamp holiday?
Anybody else found themselves in this type of situation?

I'm assuming you were serious about it

Very serious.

This is exactly what happened to me. My delay was 8 months.

Morally they may have a case but legally am I right to think they just have to suck it up like we did when our previous purchases and sale fell through?

Yes

Morally they may have a case but legally am I right to think they just have to suck it up like we did when our previous purchases and sale fell through?

Yep, their solicitors would have offered them an insurance policy which covers this situation. Forget about it.

Anybody else found themselves in this type of situation?

Yep. We didn't have to wait as long as @Señor_Bear though - we had an offer accepted 2nd December and our seller had applied for probate mid-November. They had probate granted at the end of January. So c. 10 weeks. Our solicitors didn't get the evidence of probate until March because the other side's solicitors were shit, but ultimately we were lucky - the delays at the Probate Registry mean that you'd be hard pushed to beat that at the moment.

The agent not telling you it's a probate place is a dick move, which is a bit worrying because the seller's agent is your best hope of getting it through before the new stamp duty deadline. Ours were up front about it when we viewed and told us they reckoned there was about eight weeks to go, so that was pretty much spot on, although it didn't allow for the seller's solicitors then being so shit and slow at passing the evidence of probate to ours.

What I would want if I was you is:

1. To know who is handling the probate - it won't be the conveyancer, it will be a probate solicitor, and they may not even be at the same firm.
   
2. An update on progress - where is the probate at? You can ask the agent to ask the probate solicitor for an update which they can forward to you. Critical question: Has the all the paperwork been sent to the Registry?
   
3. A sense of how efficient - or not - the other side's solicitors are. As we found out there's not much point getting Grant of Probate quickly if the the vendor's solicitors then sit on it for weeks.
   
4. As much info on the seller as possible - e..g we didn't know straight off the bat that the daughter handling the sale for the family was in Hong Kong, which was useful to know when it came to exchange because we had to make sure she FedEx'd paperwork across. Later we found out that her sister lives on the next road along, which was a bit WTF.
   
5. Where the death certificate is. Your solicitors need an original or certified copy to exchange. Our seller's solicitors, being useless, sent one of the two we needed to our solicitors by normal post. I'm not sure it ever actually arrived, but as soon as I found this out I ordered a copy direct from the Registry on next day delivery. Anyone can order anyone else's death certificate. This saved our whole transaction, because it meant we could keep to our buyer's deadline, so it would have been nice if our solicitors had suggested this, but they didn't :/
   
   

With nearly all of this, the agent is your friend. Even if they just fucked you over. Solicitors get paid anyway.

And the answer to this...

Do I let the proceedings continue to and then mention that I'll be renegotiating a new offer if delayed beyond the stamp holiday?

...if you want the house is yes. But you don't mention, you don't renegotiate. You tell the agent, in writing (email is fine), that you will be reducing your offer by £Xk (large enough sum of money to motivate) if you don't exchange by Y and complete by Z. As it's a probate sale, I would be tempted with the benefit of hindsight to go further than this and peg the reduction against meeting key milestones by set dates to keep the transaction viable.

So something like:

• Responses to initial enquiries by X
  
• Probate Granted, evidence of probate and death certificate supplied to your solicitors by Y
  
• Responses to all enquiries by Z
  
  

With Z being in good time to exchange when you want to exchange with a buffer for delays. YMMV because I don't know how far along the conveyancing process you are. Also if you don't fully understand the process (we didn't!) read up - we literally printed out the attached in the end and were ticking things off.

1 Attachment

I'm buying a house in Denmark. The entire first (second?) floor is done without planning permission and the seller has agreed to sorting it before we complete. My lawyer and my bank just called me wondering if the planning permission had been sorted all of a sudden, as I'd told them yesterday that we were looking at 10-12 weeks waiting time. Apparently the EA has drawn up some papers demanding payment within 7 business days from yesterday. Called the EA and asked about the planning permission, which hadn't been sorted or even applied for yet. "But you still want me to pay now?" - "Yes, we'll just refund you the money if it doesn't go through...".

Run away.