Currently buying/selling a house? How is it going? READ MOD NOTE POST #1

Hi All,

this thread is very helpful. It might be a stupid question but thought to ask anyways.

We are first time buyers and looking at this new housing estate coming up. Real estate agents is asking for 10,000 Euros as a booking deposit where as price of property is 340,000. It is refundable until contracts are signed. It looked a bit much to us since construction is not started yet, and agents don't even have information of inclusions. Basically nothing much other than site plan.

Does this seem like a normal practice? What can we do to make sure that all of this is secure transaction? We were thinking to hire solicitor at this point and let solicitor make this initial deposit but some people mentioned that no need to involve solicitor at this point. Moreover, how does this work, will agent refund us 6K once Revenue releases 30K of HTB to builder? (will ask these to agent as well, but interested in experiences of other ppl as well)

Thanks for the help.

I am trying to sell a property, and it's now been 7 months and the buyers bank still hasn't gone live with the draw down, despite verbally saying the loan has been approved. Every tick of their clock, where something happens, they say that the next tick is 4-6 weeks away - like nuclear fusion always being just 30 years away. It's unreal. The economy is dysfunctional with this sort of carry on.

This what you get when you have a government that seems to deliberately drive efficient foreign banks out of the Irish market.

It's not a normal house sale, more of a house on a property, with the latter being the main selling point. I have known the purchasers for a couple of decades, so I have no reason to doubt them.

Anyone know how long at the moment its taking for a bank to release deeds?

Sale agreed for 2 months and no contract. Seller blaming bank.

Took about 3-4 weeks for AIP then 1-2 weeks for loan offer once valuation was complete.

About 8 weeks was what I've seen from other groups so sounds about right.

I've said this so many times but it should be illegal to list your house until you've deeds in hand.

I have/am using my solicitor to also tie in with the vendor to get an idea how long it will take to tie up their end also, it's quite easy/straight forward to get your side of the mortgage done, but I'd your buying off a seller in a chain or who's dragging their feet on purpose there's not a lot you can do.

Unless you've completely paid off your mortgage, the bank holds on to the deeds as its the bank that owns your house.

So if you're selling with an outstanding mortgage on the property, you won't ever hold the deeds.

The bank, in this situation, may well have misplaced the deeds, and are frantically looking for them. Happens more often than you would imagine.

gone sale agreed in few weeks (as seller); buyer bank evaluation/engineer report done since, all ok; but the day our solicitor tells us they got the deeds from the bank, we hear back from the agent, the buyer pulls out due to "personal reasons".

assume will go back on the market; but wondered how are various agencies handling this here - e.g. am I meant to be charged extra for one or more buyers pulling out, or is this usually included in the initial fee ?

- hopefully this doesn't happen too many times ... have other staff to plan too.

As the seller you won't be charged any extra. Your solicitor may charge more but usually it's a fixed price. If you were purchasing and had spent money on valuations and surveyors reports then you'd have to pay again a second time. The surveyor may give you discount for a second one but basically you're getting the same service again so same fee applies.

Your estate agent is only paid when the sale goes through, they keep a portion of the booking deposit and give the rest to your solicitor. Your solicitor will deduct their fee from the proceeds of the sale and give you the balance at the end.

Ah god that's a lot of messing around, I hope you did close in the end today

We're about to close on a sale, just waiting in the bank to release funds. Seller is mad keen to complete but the bank (AIB) have been slow to respond. We uploaded docs on Tuesday and they're saying theu won't look at them until Friday and we won't get funds until early next week.

Is it the norm to arrange a pre-closing walkthrough with the estate agent? We're told the house is empty but it would be confirm that ourselves.

We used them. They were very good. Quick turnaround and very thorough. They give you a call to run through any high level issues first before the overall report issues and they have a rising damp monitor to check for damp in the walls

Sorry I meant all house purchases. If they built their house it wasn't a purchase.