Possible Progress

We have contact with the buyers' conveyancer!

They should be ready to exchange contracts on Friday. We could exchange and complete on the same day. We'd honestly rather not, as it could leave us up shit creek without the proverbial should they then not be ready. I'm currently waiting for a call back from the developers to see if they would agree to exchange on Friday with completion the following Weds/Thurs.

My apologies for continuing to bore my friends with this saga. It should all be over soon one way or the other.

A little closer

The nice lady in the Developers' site office rang me back eventually. She sounded sympathetic, but these things aren't her decision to make so she recommended that we get our lawyers to talk to their lawyers. They will want to complete on Friday as there's a month-end between then and next week.

Our lawyers briefed that we don't want to do so. There's still a risk that the buyer's name won't come off his last mortgage by Friday morning. We don't want to be in the position of having a half-filled removal lorry, being liable for the stonking amount movers cost and getting a phone call to say things can't go ahead. We don't want the stress of dealing with all the address change, utility company meter readings, post office forwarding arrangments and so on and so forth on the same day as dealing with the stresses of "will we exchange or not" and actually moving. The good news is that we won't be passed back to the idiot lawyer now he's returned from his holiday.

So now we're waiting again. If the developers come back to us saying "Complete on Friday or it's all off", our response will be "Fine - put your house back on the market and find another buyer". We write off something in the order of a grand immediately, but we'll sell to the boys anyway when they're sorted and save about 400 a month while we find ourselves something we really want.