I've written a post before on how to find a house. Once finding a place, well... that's when the work really begun. I found that some of the most stressful parts are when I found out that we missed something. We kept checking and double checking we knew what we had to do, yet still we missed things. Thankfully we got a good solicitor who reminded us of requirements as well as sorted things out for us when needed. Yet in my searches I didn't find a complete list of all the things needed to be done. I shall attempt to make a list of all the steps we went through.
When we were thinking of starting to look at buying a place, a friend who had recently bought a house told us that the one thing they regretted most was stinging out on the solicitor. With this one you really get what you pay for. I've seen in a lot of places that your solicitor should cost you proportional to the value of the place you're getting. I would say the biggest thing that makes a difference and should not be compromised on solicitor would be having 1 person that deals with all your needs. Going through some agencies, despite it being cheaper, ends up with never getting the same person meaning things may fall between the cracks.
If you're in Scotland lucky you! From this point on you know the sale will happen. For the rest of us... well there's still uncertainty to be had. For us after we had our offer accepted the seller uhmed and arred for about 2 months on whether or not they actually wanted to sell the property. Luckily for them, due to the Stamp Duty Holiday coming to an end the listings really dried up around that time so we weren't able to see anything else that was better.
When you know for certain the sale will happen, you're good to go. Notify your solicitor to start things going. That is the point when money is needed. This is the primary reason I think the Scottish system makes a lot more sense as the sellers are locked in, as a result all this money you have to spend before exchange is not lost.
We got a mortgage broker, which I do recommend. The mortgage broker's fee is due with the application, but they will give you some estimates before then. The bank will also have its own application fee. As the bank needs to do a survey of the place as well so any mortgage offer you get is locked in on the place. We found it quite tricky to get this done as there was little certainty at the beginning, and the process also takes time. Doing this through a mortgage broker offered some certainty to us as they could give us some more accurate estimates of what we should expect to get, as well as they would apply to a different lender if needed.
Warning: Mortgage offers come with expiration dates and that expiration date counts from the date of completion. So if it takes too long to complete, re-applying for the mortgage may be needed.
We got a good solicitor, so as soon as we told them we were ready to go, they sent us the bill for the searches they needed to do. Searches have a lead time depending on the council the place is in. While the council's website said 10-15 days, our solicitor told us 32 days, and it ended up being 37 days. There were some reports that Hackney searches were looking at lead times of 2-3 months at one point. Searches generally include: flood risk, landslide risk, radon poisoning, radio wave at the location, which church parish it belongs to (there are places where one needs to pay money to the parish apparently), where the pipes are (sewage, water)...
Finding a surveyor is hard, they tend to have a lead time of about 2 weeks to do the survey and another 2 weeks to get the survey back to you. Messaging a few solicitors paid off for us, as one of them had just gotten a cancellation in 3 days from us contacting them, meaning that we could get them in sooner. Nonetheless, a surveyor will ask you to pay upfront in order to book.
I've already written a post about which survey to choose here. You will need to share the survey results with your solicitor. Never share the survey results with the agent of the place. Our survey didn't show anything that we shouldn't have bought the place, however it required us to get 4 additional surveys to be sure, and to get any estimates on how much it would take to fix things.
These are trickier to arrange, primarily because they're not essential to the house purchase process. We had the agent try to convince us they were not necessary. However they are often needed to get cost estimates on any damages that the survey pointed out.
With the surveys coming back with results and price estimates it is time for price renegotiations. There are a few tricky bits here. There is an allowance for these changes, however for significant decreases the mortgage will need to be reapplied for. While there should be no problems with lending less, this requires further paperwork and time.
As to how much to bother renegotiating for it's hard to say. One thing that was pointed out to us was that it matters why things happened. For example in the event of damage due to negligence, even a small amount should be renegotiated. But for other things it's a matter of cost absorption (how much is ok to pay) and then how obvious the issue was. (With the issue being obvious the argument would be that it was taken into account on the original offer)
We didn't have an exchange date until the day before the exchange. Which was very frustrating as we never had the time to properly research Building's insurance (well... we also didn't realise we had to do it...). There's a few interesting bit here. Mortgages require you to have Building's insurance. (So the bank is safe if the building burns down or whatnot). The buyer is responsible for Building's insurance from the moment of exchange (not completion!). And sadly there's a lot of insurance companies where the terms of the insurance either explicitly rule out the cover between completion and exchange or introduce additional clauses which while they don't explicitly exclude the cover, they effectively do. So read those terms carefully, we almost got the wrong insurance initially.
This is going to be a large sum of money. This is when we got to send 10% of the deposit to the solicitor. We found out the following: Despite the limit for Faster Payments has been increased to 250,000£ most banks have not updated it in their system and they may require you to do a CHAPS payment over their daily transfer limit on your account. Lloyds will not allow you to do anything above 10,000£ over the phone. And they do not offer CHAPS over the phone. Monzo implements the increased Faster Payment limit, but do not offer CHAPS. Santander allow you to do CHAPS by phone, but do not implement the larger Faster Payment limit, defaulting to the old 100,000£.
Banks have a lot of leniency on how much they can charge for a CHAPS payment. This comes down to the way that CHAPS used to work where you had a person taking down transfer details, writing it on paper and submitting it to some basement of the Bank of England. Nowadays, this is entirely automated by computers, yet the fees have never gone away.
In this case the seller's agent is your friend. The agents get paid their commission on exchange most of the time, so they are incentivised to help sort this out for you. Exchange means the sellers are locked in to the sale. Exchange cannot happen without a completion date, and as we ended up in a chain delays and uncertainty in the chain ended up with delays and uncertainty for us, even though we were ready. Exchange requires a paper to be printed and signed then sent to the solicitors, then each party authorises their solicitors to perform the exchange. And boom, you're responsible for the building being there standing.
We almost forgot about this one. On the announcement of the exchange happening we got the mortgage deed to sign, with two witnesses and send to our solicitors. However, we were so surprised about the building insurance needed to be sorted out on that day that we didn't even notice the attachment until our solicitor reminded us about it.
Transfer any additional deposit to the solicitor. In that same bill we also had the stamp duty, the solicitor fees, any exceeding costs on searches, like the bankruptcy check, as well as the land registry fees. Similarly to the exchange this may require additional costs or pains to transfer
Congratulations, from now on mortgage payments are required. You should not get the keys. I will add details on the process when I've actually gone through it.
Before exchange your solicitor should have sent you a list of fixtures, fittings and other items that are to stay in the house. If things are missing, or have been left in the house you own them, so the seller is obliged to pay for their removal or replacement.
Between getting the keys and moving in there are a few things to take into account. And a lot of them have lead times.