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

Wow somehow it came through straight away after being moved to Final Checks this morning. What a giant relief!

Update #3

We have finally signed contracts after being sale agreed for almost 5 months ...

Big push now to get keys this side of Christmas - Almost there now! Delighted.

My solicitor applied for funds Thursday two weeks ago with PTSB and they were released exactly a week later. All I had to send in was up to date payslips and proof of mortgage protection and house insurance. They never actually queried anything which I thought they would.

I found the whole buying experience a horrible nightmare tbh but the actual drawdown part was fine. After a week of being a home owner it still hasn’t sunk in it’s going to take a while. I was years looking for the right house on and off happy to have the process completed now.

Eeeeeek! Getting so close!!! I do keep checking in to see if there are any updates :-D

Is your AIB-AIP still active since May? I thought AIB AIP was 6 months.

Had the final inspection Wednesday, vendors were in mid-moving out stage, still a bit to do but fair play to them, they got through it and left a spotless house (as well as seeing to the couple of tasks arising out of the survey.

My solicitor didn't get the funds in from Avant until 2pm Friday, meaning vendors solr wouldn't have until Monday, but it was agreed to release the keys on the basis of a screenshot of the funds in my solr's account.

End result, dash to the auctioneers at 5.15pm Friday and collected the keys, job done.

From bid accepted (without AIP) on 23rd Sept, to keys on 9th Dec, I appreciate how lucky I am reading some other stories here...again, huge credit ot my broker who was fantastic, and my solicitor too.

Did any of you renegotiate your prices after the pre-purchase survey or are those days gone?

We're just about to close on selling our house and our purchasers negotiated a lower price with us after their survey. The windows are fairly old, and they had already gone way over asking price, so we were still happy to accept a lower price. Although amending their loan offer ended up delaying the entire process by a few months which was frustrating... But I don't think negotiating after a survey is unreasonable, particularly if any issues are flagged because of it.

Would I be wrong in contacting the estate agent in regards to the current status of the vendor/their solicitors, as we are all set and have heard nothing from them in over a month not even so much as a yeah we are still working on it or anything just silence.

Agree totally with this advice. Never wait on them to come back to you - if you want/need an update, chase them for it.

Even close to the end of the process we have to push for every small update. It is like pulling teeth but I'm sure (hope) the house will be worth it!

Is anyone else out there winning the bidding process but then being told, 'sorry, you're not getting the house'? Twice in last 6 months, we've fought so hard for houses that are perfect for us and been the top bidder, but have been rejected for the underbidder. 1st time: oh, the underbidder lives up the road and contacted the vendor separately. 2nd time: almost word for word the same line, only this time 'lives 3 doors up the road'. We are ready to go, and the underbidders were not cash buyers. We are bidding on rural houses from my home county but we currently live in neighbouring county, but I'm making this clear to agents. We don't believe we are being told the truth, particularly this last time where the agent didn't put much effort into the story, and I know it is of course the vendor's decision who buys their house, but it is so, so deflating. If they were local bidders, why do they wait until the bidding goes 20% over asking before contacting the vendor? Beginning to wonder if we ever had a shot with either house and were simply used to fire up the bidding. I don't know how to stop this happening again. Is anyone else getting this issue?

Congratulations! We hope to be in the same situation next week - fingers crossed!

· November 2019: Get AIP

· March 2020: Go sale agreed

Enter Covid, subsidies, lost the sale

· November 2021: Switch job so I'm not on Covid subsidies anymore, start waiting out the probation

· June 2022: Passed probation, new AIP

· September 2022: Go sale agreed

· December 2022: I finally pick up the keys today

I am so relieved to not live in the sticks with my parents anymore. I ordered a takeaway and ate it on the stairs because I have nothing to sit on. This whole process over 3 years has been so very very awful. I would not wish this challenge on anyone else, and the whole experience was so much harder as a solo buyer.

I am going to wake up in my own home tomorrow. I cannot believe it.

Whoop whoop! Absolutely delighted for you both!!! Happy moving!

Well I wildly underestimated the complexity of getting a mortgage. For context, earlier in the year I struck gold and got a big pay out selling employee shares in a startup I'd worked at from the beginning, which was bought out by a big company. I first thought it was big enough money to buy a house outright, but after some searching (and the way prices have gone the last couple of years), it turned out to be big enough money to cover about 80-90% of a house for the size and location I wanted for my family. A mortgage for the rest should be easy I thought. An LTV of less than 20%, a total sum that's less than 2x multiple of my salary, all comfortably affordable. I went through a broker and indeed getting the approval in principal and the househunter's agreement was indeed fairly straightforward. A few months later I found the house we wanted, which actually ended up being a little cheaper than we'd allowed for. It was a new build, we put in a holding deposit, they sent contracts out, and then this is where things got tricky as I tried to get finalised with the bank.

First they went back through all the accounts they previously did for the AIP, only with significantly more nitpicking - asking for tax returns showing that certain sources of past income were declared etc, even though they'd already seen it before and it was all completely legit. This back and forth delayed for quite a few weeks, but then the real kicker was today when they looked through up to date copies of our statements and they highlighted major concerns about affordability due to the expenditure we've had in the last few months since AIP.

Again for context, we had this big windfall earlier in the year. We'd left it completely untouched because we were using it for the house. But once we had initial approval, we knew the cost of the house we were buying, and we knew we had that money set aside with quite a bit more left over (we were keeping close to 50k surplus for moving costs, furniture etc), we decided to spend some of that windfall on a few treats - live like someone who has a six figure bank account for a little while, because it will probably never happen again. So there was a big holiday, some frivolous and unnecessary expenditure, but all coming out of that extra buffer money we had with our core finances in good shape. I thought that was totally fine, the bank don't see it that way though, they see it as spending more than our income for a couple of months and a failure to demonstrate we would be able to make our payments. Nobody told us we had to demonstrate this! We already demonstrated it with year's worth of statements for the original approval and I thought that was done.

I'm now worried the whole deal will fall through, for a house that I know I can absolutely afford the repayments on (I was spending more on rent 5 years ago when my income was 40% lower than it is now) - the mortgage broker has said he'd go back and try to explain (all contact going second hand through a broker is frustrating too) but isn't promising anything.

While all this has been happening the vendor is putting me under pressure and getting a bit understandably worried. I'm concerned they might pull out if I continue delaying. I just want to get this finalised and complete the sale! At the time I put down the holding deposit I genuinely thought it was a complete formality. If they'd told me that I wasn't allowed dip into my savings during the process I wouldn't have either, but I had no idea it was such a problem.