July 2015

Why is it that buying and selling property is such a difficult and complex business?

It is well-known fact that moving house is one of the most stressful experiences that one can face – along, of course, with giving birth and getting divorced (no connection!) – but unlike those (un)happy events, re-locating is more often than not done voluntarily – which almost makes it worse. It does seem strange that the long history of real estate dealing has not resulted in the sort of highly efficient hyper-streamlined operation into which most other transactions have evolved in this oh-so modern age.

The gentle reader of a regular habit will be all too aware that I wrote next to nothing about the eventual sale of our apartment in Buckinghamshire as it went through, for fear of jinxing the process. I had good reason for this. Though in the event the sale went through almost without hitch, it was still a nerve jangling experience.

For real estate deals in the UK the whole operation – once an offer has been accepted – is placed in the hand of the two sets of solicitors, one representing each party. The ensuing process – which involves getting surveys done, carrying out Land Registry and local authority searches to ensure that there are no impediments to the deal taking place, the filling out of endless disclosure and transfer forms and the signing of the eventual contract – can take anything from a few days to months and months, with the norm being apparently around eight to twelve weeks.

Unfortunately it is extremely difficult at any point to glean exactly what is going on or why it might be taking so long. One’s own solicitor might be a most helpful chap (and ours certainly was), but he is rarely keen to rattle the cage of his opposite number. We began to fear that our sale would not complete before we left for Canada, which would have rendered far more difficult the eventual extraction of the proceeds of the sale from the UK.

Once all of the particulars are in place and the financing agreed the next step is the exchange of contracts. These documents – which set in stone the agreed date and time for completion – will have been signed by the relevant parties before being swapped. At this point a healthy deposit is also paid by the purchasers as a means of dissuading them from dropping out at a late stage.

Finally – at the agreed date and time – the monies are paid and the deeds transferred to the new owner, who normally receives the keys from the sellers estate agent.

It seems to have become the practice these days for the purchaser to try to push back the exchange of contracts until almost immediately before completion, so that the period for which the deposit is held is as short as possible. Unfortunately this means that the seller has no guarantee right until the last possible moment that the sale will actually go through at the desired time. In our case we had agreed a completion date just over a week before our departure, but the exchange was repeatedly pushed back until it finally took place the day before completion.

Needless to say, we endured some restless nights worrying that we would leave for BC without the wherewithal to purchase a property in Victoria. As it turned out, of course, the funds appeared as we were expecting and were transferred almost immediately via our currency broker of choice (Moneycorp) to our Canadian bank.

In part two – we try to buy a house in BC.