Why Thorough Chain Checks Matter When Moving Home
When moving home, it’s very common to find yourself in a chain – where your purchase depends on selling your property, and your buyer also needs to sell theirs, and so on.
This is why it’s crucial that your estate agent properly checks a potential purchaser’s entire chain before agreeing to any sale. Doing so ensures you are fully informed about your buyer’s position and allows you to make a confident decision when accepting an offer.
You may assume this is standard practice – but we recently saw how damaging it can be when this is overlooked.
We received an offer from a potential purchaser who told us they had sold their property through agent ‘A’, and believed their chain was complete.
On contacting agent ‘A’, we were told that the next link in the chain had also sold their property to a non-dependent buyer (a first-time buyer).
However, after calling agent ‘B’, we discovered this was not true – the property had not yet been sold!
Because agent ‘A’ had not double-checked the chain, their client was given false information, agreed to a sale based on it, and took their property off the market unnecessarily. The home was also wrongly marked as “Sold STC” on Rightmove, wasting valuable marketing time.
To make matters worse, Rightmove rules mean that a property must remain marked as “Sold STC” for a set period of time, currently 49 days, before it can be re-launched as a “new” listing. As a result, our potential purchaser’s property now appears to have been sitting unsold for longer than it really has, potentially putting off future buyers.
This is why we never rely solely on information from just one part of the chain – every link is always checked with each agent involved.
It’s also important to establish whether anyone in the chain is working towards a specific timescale, such as starting a new job or getting children into a new school. Ensuring all parties are aligned from the outset avoids unnecessary stress and setbacks later.
The author: Andrew Hunt
