Sale Contract

I am due to close the sale of our house at end of this month. I have just received the contract after 3 months signed by the purchaser, with a clause in it, that it is subject to them obtaining a mortgage, no deposit has been forwarded either. Is this a normal formality. This is holding up the bridging lone for the house that I am buying. I can see more of this happening with 100% mortgages because there will be no deposit available.

Any comments please.

You do not get the deposit. You get nothing until after you have handed over keys. Any deposit that does change hands is held by solicitors until the sale is completed.

The introduction of 100% mortgages will not change that situation. 10% will still need to be handed over by buyer on signing.

If your buyer has no loan offer yet (can't think why else such a clause would be there), then keep your house on the market, and give your 'buyer' a deadline.

When the property went sale agreed, an initial refundable booking deposit should have been lodged with your estate agent (typically 5k approx.). Once the contracts were signed and returned they should have been accompanied by a further deposit to bring the total deposit lodged up to 8-10% of the purchase price approx. This is non-refundable. For the purchaser, a loan offer should have been secured (and therefore they should be sure that they can get a mortgage), before the contracts were signed, so there should be no need for this clause in the contracts.

What is your solicitor saying about the situation?

Solicitor is out sick. What I meant was that the solicitor did not have a deposit with the contract, There is a small deposit with the auctioneer only.

It would seem that they have it both ways

I read a lot of posts by disgruntled buyers complaining at the way they have been treated by sellers and I sympathise, but sellers can get stung too. We were in a similar position - we went sale agreed and it took the buyers 4 months to sign the contracts - in the meantime you hold the house for them on a refundable deposit and they can still walk away after that length of time. We gave them several ultimatums -sign or the house goes back on the market, but each time were persuaded that contracts were about to be signed. Meanwhile, we had put the house on the market originally in plenty of time to purchase our new house, but 4 months later we would have been seriously pressured to find a new buyer and exchange contracts, so that dissuades you from carrying through on the ultimatim.

My advice is - don't allow time to slip by - the contracts should have been accompanied by a deposit and they should have a loan offer in place after this length of time. Give an ultimatim and stick to it.

roker,

Put simply, there isn't a signed contract for the sale of your house. What you got back from their solicitor is just a document which takes the p**s. Unless your solicitor is a sole practitioner somebody from his/her office should be on the case immediately. You should inform the other side that your house is back on the market.

Their solicitor should be ashamed of being involved in such a tawdry operation.

Our solicitor also received signed contracts back from the purchasers of our house without a deposit and we were very uneasey for 2 weeks until we received the deposit. What use are signed contracts without a deposit? Yeah, you can sue, but what would that cost you, financially and emotionally? Your solicitor should have demanded the deposit immediately and failed to act in your best interests by not doing so, same as ours. I would be extremely dubious about the subject to mortgage clause, sounds like a crowd of messers. Make an ultimatum, deposit or all bets are off.

It appears to have gone through OK. But I got ticking off from my solicitor for stopping the deposit cheque on the house that I was buying. It appears that he his doing a similar thing.