Selling Your House - The Basics

What happens when you sell a property?

The following step-by-step guide gives you the bare-bone basics of the legal process involved in selling a property:

Obtain Title Deeds
Having chosen your solicitor, he will send you a quote enclosing a form that asks for your mortgage account number and details of your building society. Your solicitor will then apply to the building society for the deeds to your property or, if you don’t have a mortgage, request that you deliver the deeds to them.

Complete Property Information Form and Contents Schedule
You will be sent a quotation for doing the work together with a property information form to fill in giving your personal details so that questions that are asked by the buyers solicitors may be answered.

Receive Title Deeds
Once your solicitor has received the deeds he will be able to prepare a draft Contract. This will be sent to the buyer’s solicitor along with the other information,

Receive additional enquiries from buyer’s solicitor
The buyer’s solicitor may require some additional information from you. It may be that answers you completed on the property information form require more detail or that the results of their searches have prompted additional questions. At this stage, your solicitor may need to obtain the additional information from outside sources, such as the local authority or insurance company.

Answer all enquiries
When all the information is available, your solicitor will make sure that the buyer’s solicitor receives everything that they require.

Approve draft contract
When the buyer’s solicitor is happy with all the information they will send back the draft Contract approved, ready for you to sign.

Make an appointment to sign contract
Your solicitor will arrange for you to sign the contract as soon as possible. If there is a dependant purchase s/he will make sure that the two transactions are tied in.

Receive deposit
On exchange of contracts, your solicitor will ask the buyers to pay a deposit of between 5% and 10% of the sale price. Although the money is not expected before exchange, the buyer’s solicitor will need to confirm that he has the funds ready to.

Propose Completion Date
Completion is the point at which the buyer pays for the property and it changes hands. The date needs to be agreed before exchange of contracts can take place.

Ready to Exchange
When you have signed your contract and (if relevant) your proposed purchase is ready, your solicitor will inform the buyer’s solicitor that you are ready to exchange contracts.

Contracts Exchanged
Once contracts have been exchanged, you and the buyers are legally committed to buy/sell the property in question. Failure to do so at this stage will result in the party at fault being in breach of contract.

Completion Date
The agreed completion date is the date upon which you must give vacant possession and the buyer can take up occupation, having first paid the balance of the purchase price. Failure to complete will result in the party at fault being in breach of contract.

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