I’m celebrating this week… we finally sold the flat. As in actually completed and money in the bank.
It’s been a long time coming, especially because the previous Friday the buyer had ‘forgotten to draw down his finance’.
I’ve had to have a lot of patience with this deal. There was no chain… so the length of time to get here has been ridiculous to say the least!
Both the buyer and head leaseholder have a lot to answer for, but seeing as buyers aren’t ‘growing on trees in south west London, we persevered.
Here’s what was on the completion statement:
Sale price: £485,000
Less
Repayment: £359,212.70
Agents fees: £11,640
Staging + Interior: £3,732.00
Solicitors: £4,800
Disbursements: £50
Notice fee: £60 (For the head leaseholder)
PLUS we got held to ransom by the head leaseholder on the day before completion for ‘£994.96 for service charge outstanding’ and we contributed £195 to the buyer for fees.
That leaves us with £104,315.34 in the bank.
Now we’ve launched a formal complaint to get the service charge back… the head leaseholder said they wouldn’t sign the transfer unless we paid it and we were an hour away from completion.
What can I say, it was a horrendous transaction.
The solicitor’s fees were pushed up by a notoriously difficult head leaseholder, whom I will be dragging through the Property Ombudsman (no one should ever have to pay that much in legal fees and we’ve done so very reluctantly but if we hadn’t done it we would never have been able to sell, it would usually be £1,500 max).
Whilst Chris doesn’t believe that we should have spent £3,732.00 on staging + interior. The RICS valuation came in at £465,000. We staged and decorated and put it on the market for £500,000 and met the buyer in the middle at £485,000. On balance it was worth it.
The reason for the valuation: To see the price of the property and whether we could afford to rent it out and adjust the mortgage to a buy to let… the answer was NO, which is why we sold it.
I feel a lot lighter with this off our backs. It was a very expensive, lengthy, complicated process… onwards and upwards.
I’ll let you know how we plan to split the money once we get there. Chris and I have very different investment mind-sets and this was our only property together (it sits outside my investment portfolio, he’s a stocks and shares man).
What did we do to celebrate? Well, Chris went to White Heart Lane to watch Spurs loose to Ajax and I ate a whole packet of soft bake cookies and puppy sat for a neighbour who needed to go to A&E.
Have you enjoyed following this journey? Comment below how you would’ve celebrated!
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Natasha
