Awaiting Property Completion

When you hear that we’ve had an offer accepted on the property that you’ve recommended to us, it’s a really exciting time! You’ll likely already be dreaming of the impact that you’re going to have on your residents lives and will hardly be able to wait to get them move in!  

As with any property purchase, it’s important to acknowledge the time between offer accepted and completion can vary and there can be a number of external factors that affect how smooth the process goes. We’re optimistic and have built up many years of experience, but it’s important to manage expectations from the start.

The typical length of time that we’d be aiming to complete within is currently around 6 months.

Process ending in completion

1. We agree a price with the vendors agent
2. We instruct our solicitors to start the conveyancing process
3. Our solicitor conducts searches on the property.  
4. The Partner Support Team receives regular updates on the property conveyancing progress from the solicitors and will update you, Cc’ing your Partnership Manager.
5. Approximately a week before completion the Partner Support Team will tell the estate agent the name of the person from your organisation who will collect the keys on completion date  

Variables affecting the completion date

Once we have an offer accepted on a property we inform our solicitors of the target completion date.  

When setting the target completion date various factors are taken into consideration such as:  

• Vendors timescales
• Speed of both parties’ solicitors
• A change in your preferences due to a change in circumstances
• The preferred completion date that you outlined in your New Property Form

Changes can happen to the completion date for a variety of reasons such as:

• Solicitors finding an unusual covenant on the property when doing their searches which makes it prohibitive for us to purchase. Property purchases can also fall through for this reason
• Vendor does not respond to their solicitor quickly  
• Vendor’s solicitor does not respond to our solicitor  
• Council are slow to provide local searches
• Issues are raised during due diligence that are not quickly resolved, etc.
• The sales chain has issues we are not aware of.
• Mortgage companies are slow to provide redemption figures.

Manage expectations

As referenced above, please ensure you manage the expectations of volunteers, contractors & potential residents. We appreciate that you have the task of managing volunteer start dates and resident start dates, and we’ll be doing all that we can on our side to ensure that we can meet the targeted completion. Make sure you let your prospective team know from the get-go what the timeline will be and work towards having everything set up for the target completion date.

In the meantime, you can be continuing to work on some fundamental aspects of getting your project ready to welcome residents, including:

• Continue to build your team and team culture – meeting regularly with your team during this time to inspire them and dream of what your project will look like should help to maintain momentum
• Continue speaking with referral agencies to ensure that your pipeline of residents is being built and you’ll hav the residents ready to move in at completion
• Line up any contractors to commence work as soon as we complete so we minimise the time that the property is empty

Waiting List

As mentioned, whilst you’re waiting to complete, you should take referrals and hold a waiting list of prospective residents, but don’t do this too early in the process. Manage expectations by giving the target completion date and advising that the property will be ready for them to move in a month after the completion date.