Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Real life | 11 May 2017

We thought we were five but it turns out we were seven: suddenly, it all became clear why contracts refused to be exchanged

Well, there were seven of us in this chain, so it was a bit crowded, to paraphrase a princess.

We didn’t know there were seven. We thought there were five. Imagine my confusion, therefore, when my house sale and purchase didn’t go through day after day, despite all five lawyers being on the phone to each other in conference calls trying to exchange contracts, and the contracts just refusing to be exchanged.

Every day, at 5.30 p.m., my solicitor would call me and tell me it was no go. And the next morning I would ring the estate agents and say I couldn’t understand it.

I’ve been under offer since March 2016. My house has been packed up for more than a month. We sent for the mortgage funds twice, and had to send them back, losing them at one stage in the ether of a New Delhi call centre.

And then I worked it out. On the last night before my mortgage offer expired, my solicitor rang wearily to tell me, as usual, that we hadn’t exchanged.

‘No. It hasn’t gone through,’ he said, adding: ‘The solicitor at the top said he had to check his client’s funds were there.’

And he said the name of the client, which coincided like a starburst in my addled brain with an email my agent had sent me the previous day naming ‘the couple’ at the top of the chain. I had assumed this was a mistake.

But now the mismatch screamed out like a siren. Maybe it wasn’t a mistake. Reading the email again more carefully, I realised that it mentioned not only the couple but also someone they were buying from.

I asked my lawyer and he said he had never heard of either of them.

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