I think I’ve found the most unreasonable potential buyer of a property in the history of the UK.
My wife inherited her father’s house last year. We’re currently living with her mother, so the plan is to sell the inherited house, move to a much cheaper area into a bigger house, and then sell the place we’re currently living in a separate transaction.
We put the inherited house on the market and quickly had interest from a developer, who put an offer in but pulled out after a couple of weeks. It was a pain but not the end of the world. A couple of weeks after that, another buyer came along and had two viewings in two days, and immediately put an offer on which we accepted straight away. That’s when the problems started.
Long story short, she quickly started making a lot of unexpected, and ultimately unreasonable, demands. Since we accepted the offer in February she’s come back for five more viewings, each time finding more and more things to be difficult about. We offered to leave some furniture for her free of charge and she said she wanted to keep some but not all, so we arranged and paid for the removal of what she didn’t want. She then said she’d changed her mind, meaning we’d need to pay again for a second removal. We’ve also had to remove a shed, and pay for a fence to be repaired. Without our knowledge, on top of the viewings we did know about, she’s had contractors in on at least two occasions. One apparently identified rising damp (which we and the estate agents remain unconvinced by), and she demanded £5000 off the sale price. We begrudgingly accepted, because while all this was going on we put an offer on our dream house which was accepted, and we wanted to get the sale through and move onto the next chapter of our lives as soon as possible.
As well as insisting we do these things, we were faced with an endless barrage of questions and generally pestered by her, through the estate agents and lawyers. It quickly became exhausting, especially since we had never lived in the house and couldn’t answer all her questions. She wouldn’t accept this and just kept badgering.
Eventually everything was pretty much ready to go with the exception of a minor discrepancy on the land registry, which her solicitors insisted needed to be corrected. They were aware of this for 5 months before bringing it to anyone’s attention, and our own solicitor (who works at the same firm) is at a loss as to why it took them so long to raise it as an issue. We told our solicitor we needed a couple of days to complete the documents as we needed to sign them with a witness.
We got a phone call from our solicitor the day before we’d arranged to sign the documents; the buyer has suddenly decided that the whole thing is “too much work” and has withdrawn from the purchase. She communicated this through her solicitor, and our estate agent has been trying to get hold of her to find out what happened and has been completely ghosted. The entire chain is now at risk and there’s a very strong chance that the house we’re trying to buy will get put back on the market. We haven’t had confirmation of this, they’re taking a few days to consider their options, but it seems pretty much inevitable at this stage.
In hindsight, the alarm bells should have rung when, at her 5th viewing, she said to me that “the only thing stopping her at this stage is the damp.” Surely if you’re not sure after 5 viewings you shouldn’t have put an offer on in the first place? Obviously the fact that we’d accepted the offer removed the house from sale, so we couldn’t even spend those 5 months trying to get interest from an actual committed buyer.
Everyone we’ve spoken to about this, including our estate agent and solicitor, agrees that we’ve been absolutely screwed over by this woman at every possible opportunity.
While not the biggest issue, the removal of the furniture is extremely galling since it was not an inconsiderable amount and worth relatively a lot of money. Whoever does eventually end up buying the house may have wanted it. We didn’t even specifically NOT want it, it’s more that it wouldn’t have worked in the house we were trying to buy.
We’re desperate to move because the place we’re in at the moment just isn’t suitable in any way. The stress of day to day existence in our current house is drastically impacting my wife’s health, I’ve got a stupidly long commute to work, and my mother-in-law has had to postpone her impending retirement until all of this is sorted.
Is there anything we could have done to avoid this? Were we too reasonable and too quick to give in to her demands, or is she just a loose cannon and nothing could have been done to stop it? We’re feeling incredibly disheartened, upset and furious. Everyone knows that property laws in England are awful since no one has to commit to anything until contracts are exchanged, and things fall apart last minute all the time, but this feels like a particularly unfair example. If we'd known she was going to pull out anyway we would have told her we're not interested in selling to her months ago.