posted 23 February 2005 04:42 PM         

Reserved a plot about a month ago and paid the £250 deposit, received the missives and solicitor signed and returned them on our behalf.

The following week however we got landed with a huge unexpected repair bill for our current home so could not pay the rest of the deposit which was due in a few days and could not put our house on the market as hoped.

I called the sales agent at the site and informed them of the situation,she was very nice and understanding and said these things happen...end of story i thought and wrote off the £250 deposit.

Not so have now received a letter from solicitor stating Redrow refusing to recind on the contract they want the rest of the deposit and expect us still to move when the house is ready (which should be in June some time). They are now charging us 5% above base rate on the unpaid deposit and if we don't move it's just going to be a nightmare of fees and interest.

To top it off we couldn't move if we wanted to due to the repairs to our current home we won't be able to put it on the market until they are finished which wont be till the end of march beginning of april.

Solicitor has more or less said we're stuck and Redrow are refusing to put their house back up for sale despite the fact that we only reserved it less than a month ago and informed them 3 weeks later that we could not go ahead.

Is it just me or is this a bit unreasonable!

Any advice welcome

posted 21 June 2005 06:06 PM         

In England you would not be advised to commit yourself legally to buy a property unless you were certain you had the money to go ahead with the purchase which would usually mean in your kind of case that you had simaultaneously exchanged contracts and become legally committed to a sale of your present property. If problems were raised by your buyer once your property was looked at, your sale would be held up but you wouldn't then be legally committed to going ahead with your purchase, because your buyer wouldn't commit himself to the excahnge of contracts until he was happy and might try to renegotaite the price exc if he found problems with the structure etc.

People complain about the slowness of the English system where we have chains of transactions which take a long time to put together. The Government has just spent a lot of energy in bringing in a new system in England using Home Information Packs from 2007 which will save about a week on the average transaction but completely fails to do anything at all about the main cause of delays - the conveyancing chain!

I am sorry about your experience - your solicitor should have warned you about the final nature and the implications of your legal commitment to buy the new house. There was always going to be a risk in selling you present property, and I am sorry to say your experience points out to English house buyers and sellers that reforming our system is not just a matter of changing to a system like that in Scotland because that too has its disadvantages.

posted 22 June 2005 05:14 PM         

They continued to hold us to the terms of the contract though. Anyway they sold the house but never informed us, so we found out by mistake!

We don't know where we stand now, there may or may not be cost to pay if they sold the house for less than they originally sold to us, we can only wait and see....

It's our own fault really as we should not have signed contracts till our own house was sold, but they really do win whichever way they go, they don't give you a date when your house will be ready until 2 weeks before, then you must move in on that date or they start charging you interest.

On the other hand if something happens at their end you have no redress and your left homeless!

posted 23 June 2005 09:38 AM         

Your point about the 2 weeks notice IS the same as in England, so it is worth emphasising this aspect for English house buyers.

In England if you are buying a new house and it is nowhere near being finished then the builder will generally want you to exchange contracts but will not give you a definite date for completion, but only you have to complete the purchase within 2 weeks of the builder telling you the house is finished

This causes all kinds of problems for people who are selling their own house to buy a brand new one, because in turn they either have to persuade their buyers to accept a "floating" completion date on the same 2 weeks notice or be prepared to move out if the new house is not ready in time for any date that may have been agreed in the contract for the sale of the present house.

As you can imagine, people down a chain are not very interested in the person buying the new house's concerns and so that person has to be prepared to move out and find somewhere else to live. This is advice I always give to those buying new houses. The alternative is not to buy a brand new house. They are generally overpriced anyway!