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I wasn't really sure which section to put this in, so mods please move to a more appropriate subforum if this is the wrong one.
There is a fair amount of equity tied up in my house and my strategy for quite some time has been to sell the house, pay off the mortgage with the proceeds and buy somewhere outright with the remainder.
I was very close to achieving this but have been stabbed in the back by a very demanding buyer who pulled out after more than a month of stringing me along. I thought progress was finally being made when she phoned last Thursday to arrange for her surveyor to visit the house, which would have been today. Then on Monday she suddenly decided she was pulling out for what seem rather spurious reasons.
She had a first-time buyer (with a mortgage agreed in principle) buying hers, so she would have been a cash buyer on mine and wanted reassuring that I would be prepared to move out if I hadn't found somewhere myself when she was ready to proceed. After a lot of intensive house-hunting in a city 35 miles away, I had actually managed to find a really good house to move to and got my offer accepted on it. With the seemingly good news that she was sending a surveyor to mine, I instructed a surveyor to look at the house I had made an offer on.
The reason she gave for pulling out was that the area I live in had flooded in the past (although it has subsequently had millions spent on new flood defences that bring it to better than a 1-in-200 standard, well above the 1-in-75 required by insurers). Indeed, I recently changed insurance to Direct Line, who are VERY picky about this sort of thing, and they have happily insured it for an astoundingly low premium. Furthermore, she lives in York, which has a much worse flooding problem (with several high risk areas unprotected), so it beggars belief that such a person would not have been aware of such issues and checked them out before even making an offer, let alone more than a month down the line! So everyone who knows what has been going on agrees that it's rather more likely that this person has simply found something she likes better and is using the flood issue as an excuse.
Now I am well and truly shafted. I've actually been on income-based JSA for a while because work with my skillset is really hard to come by in such a remote area (another reason why I was relocating). Worse still, the help with my mortgage interest ends in January, so I was trying to stay ahead of the game by getting shut of the mortgage. I'm still having to top up the rest of the mortgage payments from my savings, which are now depleted. It's therefore going to be very hard to twiddle my thumbs waiting for a new buyer to be found - and if I drop the price in order to speed things up, that further limits my choice of buying options.
I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. I'm even considering going to one of those "we buy houses for cash" firms but I've read a few horror stories about them making an attractive offer to reel you in, then dropping it down to 60% of value just before contracts are ready.
Anyone have any advice on how to get out of this mess?
There is a fair amount of equity tied up in my house and my strategy for quite some time has been to sell the house, pay off the mortgage with the proceeds and buy somewhere outright with the remainder.
I was very close to achieving this but have been stabbed in the back by a very demanding buyer who pulled out after more than a month of stringing me along. I thought progress was finally being made when she phoned last Thursday to arrange for her surveyor to visit the house, which would have been today. Then on Monday she suddenly decided she was pulling out for what seem rather spurious reasons.
She had a first-time buyer (with a mortgage agreed in principle) buying hers, so she would have been a cash buyer on mine and wanted reassuring that I would be prepared to move out if I hadn't found somewhere myself when she was ready to proceed. After a lot of intensive house-hunting in a city 35 miles away, I had actually managed to find a really good house to move to and got my offer accepted on it. With the seemingly good news that she was sending a surveyor to mine, I instructed a surveyor to look at the house I had made an offer on.
The reason she gave for pulling out was that the area I live in had flooded in the past (although it has subsequently had millions spent on new flood defences that bring it to better than a 1-in-200 standard, well above the 1-in-75 required by insurers). Indeed, I recently changed insurance to Direct Line, who are VERY picky about this sort of thing, and they have happily insured it for an astoundingly low premium. Furthermore, she lives in York, which has a much worse flooding problem (with several high risk areas unprotected), so it beggars belief that such a person would not have been aware of such issues and checked them out before even making an offer, let alone more than a month down the line! So everyone who knows what has been going on agrees that it's rather more likely that this person has simply found something she likes better and is using the flood issue as an excuse.
Now I am well and truly shafted. I've actually been on income-based JSA for a while because work with my skillset is really hard to come by in such a remote area (another reason why I was relocating). Worse still, the help with my mortgage interest ends in January, so I was trying to stay ahead of the game by getting shut of the mortgage. I'm still having to top up the rest of the mortgage payments from my savings, which are now depleted. It's therefore going to be very hard to twiddle my thumbs waiting for a new buyer to be found - and if I drop the price in order to speed things up, that further limits my choice of buying options.
I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. I'm even considering going to one of those "we buy houses for cash" firms but I've read a few horror stories about them making an attractive offer to reel you in, then dropping it down to 60% of value just before contracts are ready.
Anyone have any advice on how to get out of this mess?
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