Purchasers Bank has Not released Funds to Complete House Sale.

D

Derry

Registered User
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48
Hello,

We are selling our late Uncles house in order to pay his Fair Deal Bill.

The first contracts have been signed and deposit paid on the property. The sale was due to be completed by the 17th July.

Our solicitor has informed us that the Purchasers solicitor rang him to say that to date the Bank has not yet released the funds to complete the sale despite numerous attempts to contact the bank to establish the reason for the delay. Although No explanation has been given.

Should we now withdraw from the sale and put the property back on the market or should we wait a bit longer to see if the funds will be released?

Any advice on this matter would be very welcome.
 
Get your solicitor to serve a Completion Notice. This will entitle you to pull out of the contract after 28 days if the sale does not complete within the 28 day period. It will also entitle you to charge contractual interest from the date the Completion Notice is served on the purchaser’s Solicitor. It puts pressure on the purchaser to complete and they forfeit the deposit if you end up pulling the property from the sale.

I had to do this when I sold a property and the purchasers were messing around. The sale closed within the 28 days.

A completion notice focuses the mind.
 
I can’t answer your question as to whether you should pull out of the sale or not. What I can say, as someone in the middle of a house purchase right now, is that there have been a lot of people talking about significant delays with the banks recently, particularly getting to drawdown. What usually takes 2-3 days is taking weeks in some cases. Some banks seem to be a lot worse than others.

That said, it's not right for you to be left with no idea how long this might drag on for. Setting a deadline through your solicitor, like Jayom suggests, gives everyone a clear time frame to work to.


Isn’t a ‘subject to finance’ clause a fairly standard part of a contract where the buyer requires a mortgage to make the purchase? Since in this case it appears it’s the bank messing everyone around rather than the purchasers, my understanding is that the deposit can’t be forfeit. I would also wonder if contractual interest can be applied in this situation.
 
Fair point which I hadn’t considered. Worth checking the contract. My sale was to a cash purchaser so that clause didn’t apply. In any event it might be worthwhile serving the completion notice so as to put the purchaser on proof of their difficulties with the bank ie they would have to demonstrate their difficulties with the bank to the vendor. Sometimes, the bank is used as an excuse for delay when it’s not the real reason.
 
UPDATE!!
The Solicitor rang me again this morning. The Purchasers solicitor has forwarded the funds to complete the sale. They blamed the Banks delay in releasing funds on the recent Bank Holiday.

Alls well that ends well.

Thank you to everyone for answering my query and for you valuable advice its good to know these things for the future.

Wishing everyone the very best ,

Derry
 
I was told about 5 weeks ago by a bank themselves that there was a 3 week delay in releasing funds.
 
Would this also apply to a council loan? Are they any quicker?
 
roker said:
Would this also apply to a council loan? Are they any quicker?
Click to expand...

It might. Councils get periodic lump payments for housing loans from Central Government, so if there's no funding from Central Government in the LA's kitty at a given time then there might be a short delay in funds being made available to borrowers.
 
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