Buying A House...

[Stuart_Wales]

...we've had an offer accepted for a property, whats the correct chain to go now?

We need to complete mortgage paperwork, which will get done later this week. Should I go for solicitors fee's before or after that?

Also, anyone know at what stage I have to pay stamp duty?

Thanks.

 

[Picto]

I'm guessing from your forum name that you're based in wales and presumably buying in wales? (only reason I ask is that things are a little different north of the border in Scotland and over in NI).

The next step would be to speak to your mortgage advisor and enquire about what mortgage options are available to you. He / she will make some recommendations and assess your suitability etc. Once they have done that and you have selected a lender, they will then seek to get an "Agreement in Principle" from that lender. This is, basically, a credit check etc and confirms that *if* the information provided to them checks out (income / expenses / etc) and the property matches their criteria then they will produce the final mortgage offer. You should remember that an Agreement in Principle does not g'tee you a mortgage offer so you should not commit to buying (i.e. by exchanging contracts) before you have the actual offer.

If the mortgage advisor is confident he / she will be able to arrange you a mortgage, then you should instruct a solicitor now too. It can take 6-8 weeks for the solicitor to do all the various checks / paperwork etc, so instructing them as early as possible is best.

Your solicitor will probably want some money up front to cover search fees (i.e. water searches, local authority searches, etc etc).

Stamp duty is payable on completion and based on the purchase price / value. If you don't want to share on here publicly what you're paying then feel free to PM. Alternatively check the HMRC website for details of how much you will have to pay. You will also need to pay the Land Registry fee for registering the purchase (usually a couple / few hundred). Your solicitor will probably also want their fees on completion too.

Hope that helps. It's a long path but definitely worth it :thup:

 

[road2ruin]

Assuming you are buying a fairly standard property i.e. not a shell of a house to do up etc then do not pay for anything more than a basic valuation survey! If you pay more it won't be worth the paper it's written on due to the numerous caveats etc they stick in their terms and conditions.

We learnt this the hard way when we decided to pay additional money for a Homebuyers Survey. When we buy our next property I will just ask an electrician, gas man and builder to come and have a look round as they will almost certainly spot things that a surveyor hasn't got a clue about.

 

[Picto]

I would half agree with road2ruin. I think getting surveys on properties certainly have their place. You (probably) wouldn't buy an expensive car without service history and an MOT but people shell out their life savings on property without even getting an idea of what skeletons might be lurking!

I certainly wouldn't recommend going with an upgraded lender's survey (basically the lender will send out a 'surveyor' to do their valuation and will usually offer to upgrade it to some kind of 'HomeBuyers' report as road2ruin has said).

If you do decide to get a survey done, I would recommend arranging your own independent one where you and only you are the surveyor's client and not some half baked one with a kick back profit for the lender!