How to ensure a sale proceeds without delay

Sellers often ask how long will it take to move into a new home. If we lived in a perfect world an offer would be accepted and you'd be unpacking boxes six weeks later. Sadly this isn't a perfect world and there are many factors that they can influence the timeline of your property sale or purchase.

The first step is to make sure you have an estate agent and solicitor in place that are both aware of your time frame. It's also essential to check that your buyer has sorted out their finance. This is something that your estate agent should have checked before recommending you accept an offer from them, as a part of their vetting process, in order to make sure they are in a position to proceed with a sale. If this is not completed then this could be a real issue and therefore cause an unnecessary delay, or worse, result in a sale falling through.

Ideally a sale could be completed within six weeks if it's a simple straightforward sale with no chain and it is unusual for a house sale to take any longer than three months. If there is a chain there can be unexpected delays with other parties to the sale having their own challenges resulting in delays so you can expect your house sale to take typically between three and four months when this happens.

It is advisable to establish a completion date as soon as you can for all parties and to make this a part of the negotiations. Solicitors and surveyors will be busy especially during peak periods when sales are higher and therefore find themselves stretched which can hold things up. It's therefore important that you use a recommended solicitor that you feel confident will get things moving for you and help to speed up the process and mitigate any delays.

Solicitors who can appear to have no incentive to act quickly are one of the biggest causes of frustrations to clients so it's important to choose an agent that is on the case, chasing any missing paperwork and communicating frequently with all parties to minimise delays and therefore ensure a smooth transaction.

If you cannot rely on your estate agent to communicate between all parties in a timely manner then this will only cause delays and hassle leaving you with no option but to try to get things sorted out yourself. Avoid an understaffed estate agent and do not choose an agent based purely on price.

The most important thing you can do is to choose a great estate agent and a reliable solicitor other than that make sure that all the relevant property searches are up to date and have all of your paperwork prepared and ready with your funding in place in order to help the sale and purchase process progress quickly.

If you would like to talk to us about property in Guildford please feel free to call me on 01483 320207 or go to https://instantvaluation.newman.uk.com/ to discover how much your property is worth today.