How to Avoid House Moving Drama

How to Avoid House Moving Drama

Little did I know when I put my house on the market how much house moving drama I was going to have to live through before we could finally move eighteen months later! I had a couple of friends who’d had similar lengthy house moving dramas but I just thought, that ain’t happening to me! Well, well, well, spirit moves in mysterious ways. This blog will cover my personal experience and give you some useful tips on how to avoid house moving drama.

I felt the urge to move house from literally the moment Uranus moved into my fourth house, unfortunately my Moon also resides in my fourth house which spells emotional rollercoaster! So, in truth, this was the second or third time I’d decided to sell up and leave the area. I can’t precisely recall because the trauma has largely been erased from my memory!

The first time, we tried Purple Bricks. I have a background in sales and felt I could do a much better job of selling my house than someone who a) seemed like they couldn’t be arsed and b) didn't know the house and able to answer the potential buyers questions. Unfortunately, the British culture means people shy away from meeting the actually homeowners, it’s far more comfortable to get down and dirty from a distance. So, I only met a couple of potential buyers, one set of nosey parkers who liked to view all the houses on our estate for some reason and one family I didn’t want living in my house. The process put me off for a year.

This latest time, we hit the market at the tail end of Covid, January 2021. So interest was initially slow, but as soon as restrictions lifted in March, we sold in April to the first people that looked at it. After three months of no interest we took this offer seriously, despite the rather long chain dangling behind it. Desperation can make you compromise common sense.

We quickly found some where we wanted to buy, but because this was at the tail end of the stamp duty holiday, there was enormous pressure to pull this off in under a couple of months… I have to say the concept of saving so much money acted as a powerful galvanising tool to spur us on.

Long story short, the wretched chain, which was supposedly very advanced and secure broke at the eleventh hour. Yes, the entire house was pretty much packed, the people we’re buying from had moved into rented and the children were signed up to start a new school in September, that's how close we came!

At first the chain didn’t entirely break, no it painfully lingered on all Summer with us locked in a horrible cycle of it potentially happening on a daily basis. Imagine the stress! We didn’t unpack, we didn’t go anywhere, we didn’t dare, we kept the faith and moved the children to the new local school.

With a little more time on our hands we were then able to absorb the contents of our structural survey, they weren’t pretty and we duly asked for recompense with a price reduction. This was given, but the way in which the sellers handled it spooked my husband, so when they put their house back on the market halfway through August he forced me to look around too.

We found another house we liked, it was completely different and a thousand times better maintained and by this time we were jaded and wanted an “easy option“. So, we took our chain and went for this one, promising we’d sort the sale out in about three to four weeks. We even pulled it off too, with an enormous effort, but the bottom of the chain, the cause of the original problem, broke away completely on the day of exchange again!

The new property sellers didn’t hang about, we were their fifth buyers, and put their property back on the market that afternoon, as did we. We sold again over the weekend, but upon letting their agent know on Monday morning, he advised that one of the their original buyers had reoffered on it and their offer was £30,000 more than ours. So, we had to let it go…

So, we were sold but without a house to buy and children at a new school twenty minutes drive away. I was frantically looking as my new chain was also apparently very advanced and chomping at the bit for us to find somewhere. After trying to buy two other properties and being beaten on price or the sellers changed their minds, the original house came back on the market.

I saw it as a sign and spent a long weekend persuading Gary to go after it again, after all, all the conveyancing was done. It was a bloody hard sell on my part and I won’t tell you what it took, other than blood, sweat and tears to get him to change his mind. It looked like it would all come together, I was over the moon, the rest of the family were less enthusiastic.

The new chain had a hiccup just before exchange and had managed to quickly swap buyers and then tried to get us to reduce our price by £10,000 because their new buyers had squeezed from them. We refused because our house price was still the same as in January 2021 despite the hike in market prices.

I kid you not, the day before exchange Gary went to view the house again, they’d left it vacant since the end of June, to ensure all was in order and discovered a huge leak in the roof. He discovered it by simply opening the attic hatch to get doused in water, which was dripping from the sodden rafters. He was furious and said that he wanted the roof inspected and thus to delay exchange, the sellers tried to pass it off as condensation and sent us a fake letter from a builder saying they wouldn’t re-negotiate on price. All trust was broken.

Ironically, on the day of exchange our buyers, who’d employed a terrible surveyor for our place, I say terrible because he decided we’d added on an extension to our modern box house when it was clear from the original plans that we had not. He’d misinformed our buyers on several issues and they decided to once again to try to get us to give them the £10,000 off the asking price. Again, knowing the real value of the house we said no way and they pulled out.

The people we were buying from then decided because we weren’t now sold to not sell to us because they felt we were being unfair over the price of their house. Gary was very relieved, I was heartbroken and completely confused and trying to see what on earth was going on. Ironically, when they did actually sell again, I was driving past it four times a day on the bloody school run, I saw that they had had to fix the chimney and roof before their sale completed!

We were considering just staying put, though this was a very bitter pill to swallow, the school commute was expensive in every way and I was totally done with living here. But decided to give it one last punt, we raised the house price to reflect market value and swapped agents to someone we knew would manage the process properly.

Yes, I now had enough experience of the local agents to know who was actually worth their salt and what kind of skills they needed to be any good. I also checked this decision out with my solicitors, who’d also experienced our various chains and could report on which agents actually got back to them and stayed on top of the process, so do ask your solicitor who they like working with before you appoint an agent.

We said cash buyers only, no more chains, but the first people who saw it offered full asking price, promised us no pressure and were in a small but apparently established chain. The second lot also put in an offer but it was a lot lower, so we decided this new agent would keep us safe and be able to rat out any lies.

Of course, the promise to not pressure disappeared very early on and the market was now very hot and lacking in anything decent where we wanted to live. I was by now a complete Rightmove addict, I increased my search area by another five miles I was so desperate and had my best friend similarly combing the market with me on a daily basis.

One day she asked me if I’d viewed this house in Ringmer. Funnily enough, I’d noticed it come on the market in January but the pictures didn’t look great and the floorplan looked too small for us so I’d dismissed it. Out of desperation, I thought why not and booked into see it. Of course, when we rocked up I saw immediately how gorgeous it was and thought yes maybe but having had my fingers well and truly burnt and heart broken I wasn’t going to go overboard.

We saw another house in an entirely different county right by the sea on the same day and it was a toss up between the two. By this time in the process, a year on, I was all for ripping up the location criteria and starting again. Ultimately though, we knew this one, despite being, overpriced was more suited to us so we made an offer of what we could afford.

Meanwhile, I went away to Glastonbury with my best friend for a much needed spiritual break. Though frustratingly, I couldn’t free myself properly from the energy of it all. And when they did reject our offer asking us to go higher, which we could not, I found myself once again surprisingly heartbroken. I had thought I had managed not to fall in love!

Whilst under the spiritual haze of Glastonbury, I decided that fuck it I was having this house, it wasn’t getting away, and I cast my magic around it and pulled it towards me. I just couldn’t and wouldn’t accept it wasn’t my home.

When I got back, I explained everything to my estate agent, asking him to give his view on the value of the house. He was under a lot of pressure from our buyers and the chain, so he had a lot of skin in the game. He agreed it was over priced and spoke to their agent, convincing her that it was over priced. We were the only offer these people had had in the three months they’d been on this “hot” market. She somehow, apparently it took an afternoon in the garden, persuaded them to accept us.

I was over the moon, but totally trepidacious given my now lengthy experience of this horrid process. We promised a quick buy because we were now pro’s in moving quickly. Well, that was March and it took until the 17th June, which was nearly a year to the day from the first collapsed sale. The chain although solid wasn’t checked thoroughly enough and the people at the bottom’s mortgage offer ran out the day of exchange, which is when we found that fundamental piece of information out! So this final purchase wasn’t without it’s dramas.

And, the entire process was like that, all the fails came at the critical moments, despite all my best efforts to avoid them. This has been one hell of a lesson on managing extreme stress response, I had to learn how to not eat or scream my way out of crisis over and over again. I also had to learn how to totally surrender to spirit and trust that the right door would open to us. Given that I am both a manifestor and generator and thus used to running the whole show myself, this was a big step into the unknown.

This house does feel like my forever home, I feel I’ve sacrificed a lot of old behaviours in order to be blessed enough to live here. You will have to come and see it for yourself, it is gorgeous and definitely the best of the bunch.

These are my house buying tips, sorry had to get the monologue out of the way to purge some of the drama and to record it for myself in case I ever take this for granted and forget to trust spirit.

Number 1

Get your existing house in order, get all the correct documentation for any renovations or improvements you’ve made together so you can hand it over to your solicitor. You don’t want to leave yourself wide open to additional costs or price reductions because you haven’t got your house in order.

Number 2

Clean out your gutters, wash down any facias, the guttering is testament to how you have looked after your home and failing guttering causes untold problems like damp. It is something any savy house buyer will be looking at. Obviously clean up and de-clutter your house too, you want to convey that you’ve looked after your property well. Prospective buyers, especially families, generally do not want to do lots of work.

Number 3

Choose a good solicitor, pay the money, they are totally worth it. They will be able to work faster and more thoroughly for you and can recommend good estate agents. And, they are responsible for the exchange and completion and if they are cheap or don’t like you they can really cause you a problem by not being on top of things. The people at the bottom of our chain’s solicitor didn’t tell them their mortgage offer had expired until we came to exchange! I had mine, before we committed to completing on a Friday, confirm with every single other solicitor in the chain and check which banks were involved in the process, that we wouldn’t be left hanging over the weekend; we were completed by 11.30am and we were fourth in the chain so they really pulled it out of the bag.

Number 4

Get a good mortgage broker, always worth double checking their findings against your own. They will take the hassle out of it for you and get you your offer a lot quicker by being in the know. They can pull strings when needs be, though I have to confess mine went away for a much needed break and I took firm control of the reigns and rang the mortgage company three or four times a day when I needed them to expedite a decision.

Number 5

Use a good estate agent, find someone who will go that extra mile and thoroughly check the potential buyers out properly. You can tell they are thorough by the way they quiz you about your house, you want them to be asking lots of questions. You also need to give them your full criteria, what kind of buyers you are looking for, what time frames will work for you, whether you want them to do all the viewings without exception, what length of chain is acceptable to you, whether you will allow people who haven’t yet sold to view.

Number 6

If, you get told that a potential buyer is a cash buyer, make sure you find out if they have the cash sitting in the bank and ask for proof before accepting someone else’s word for it or if they mean they aren’t taking a mortgage out and are using the cash from their own sale. It’s a very murky world out there, full of lies and deception.

Number 7

If, you are told that the potential buyer already has a mortgage offer, find out if this is in principle or actually fact that they can borrow the amount they need to purchase your house.

Number 8

Long chain’s aren’t always avoidable, make sure your estate agent and solicitor have thoroughly checked out every single person in the chain and you’ve seen proof. We got told soooooo many fibs it was ridiculous, and thus spectacular fuck ups were rife and of course no one holds their hands up for the incompetence! First time buyers at the bottom isn’t great.

Number 9

Don’t trust the professionals, you need to keep checking everything yourself and not rest on your laurels. Just keep asking for proof and email confirmation for every step of the process. Yes, terribly frustrating because what are you paying them for, but necessary if you want a stress less experience; you can’t have stress free with this twisted english house buying process, it is ridiculous.

Final word

Obviously, I hope you find some useful tips on how to avoid house moving drama, where possible. I developed many useful essential oil blends and herbal teas to help me through this horrendous experience, which you can also benefit from, just get in touch.

I can also recommend a good solicitor, mortgage broker and estate agent.