A block of 3x 1 bed flats and a ground floor take away. A Greek Take Away to be exact. #freegyros 🏘 Our first whole block of flats
🏣 Our first commercial unit
💰 Our first semi commercial mortgage (mixed use) 📍 Our first in a new area
🥱 2nd longest conveyance we have ever done After 5.5 months of long winded back & forth, we have finally exchanged and completed last Friday at 5:49pm! Tell me what kind of solicitors work past 5pm on a Friday? Mine sure do! The last time we viewed the property was on May bank holiday. I understood that this would be a little more complicated as we were essentially buying 4 properties in 1. Each had to have their own certificates, tenancies etc . However here is where the hurdles started:
The property took 3 weeks to negotiate on price. It took us about 2 weeks to ensure that we had a lender who would lend as we weren’t cash buyers. On top of this, the vendors were 2 JV friends - 1 of whom lives abroad, so one had to make sure the other was OK with the eventual sale price
The vendors didn’t have all the certificates in place. In fact they probably had about 25% of all the essential sale particulars. This was a massive pain in the a__ to source, but they were very good about it. Everything from has safety certs, to EICRs that were never done, expired EPCs which then caused issues with the lender, fire risk assessments, planning, building regs. The whole shebang - none of it was in place at the beginning of the conveyancing process. It was PAINFUL. Luckily the agent was really good and very quick to put these in place, so we didn’t have to wait too long to get stuff done.
The vendor never communicated with the tenants that the valuer & agent would be coming around to conduct the valuation. That was fun. The valuer had to come back to do the ground floor survey which then caused delays.
My top 5 tips for conveyancing:
Check the vendor was serious and had all the paperwork in hand. This was the major cause of delays!
If you are doing anything over August, factor in a major time delay. Maybe even write off 4 weeks because *someone* won’t be there. #fact
Write a ridiculously long list of all your questions up front to prevent a lot of back and forth.
Get yourself a good power team! In this case, my solicitor team and mortgage broker and insurance broker were all 10/10. Really pushing it from every angle and quick to respond! Ask for recommendations from your network.
Respond quickly. Get things signed and progressed and keep everyone in the loop. Communication is so crucial during a purchase in order to keep it moving along.
If you are interested in getting involved in this project or interested in our earn and learn programme, hit reply and we will send you some info!
By the time the survey was completed - it was August. What does that mean? Everyone goes on holiday! Solicitors, brokers, agents - everyone was away at some point which meant getting a response was SLOW. This happened again in October and was even worse than the August slow down!
The vendors solicitor never fully responded to enquiries. So the same enquiries were left outstanding for long periods of time. This was pretty frustrating.
The lender’s underwriter kept changing their mind! We had to up our insurance coverage twice. Then they said because the Flat 3 was vacant - it doesn’t meet their criteria, so we needed to sign a supplement to show it would be let and for more than expected.
The lender also, declared that the covenant in the commercial lease were weak, so they opted to declare it was vacant (it wasn’t) and was therefore downvalued the property by £30k from the valuation report and £10k under what we were buying it for. We needed to go back to the vendor and renegotiate due to this.
The mortgage offer had to be extended not once, not twice but 3 times! Unheard of, but that valuer was at it again! On holidays for 3 weeks! Which caused us an 8 day delay on the original set completion date because he needed to say “the planning is fine”.
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