Selling your house (UK): a cautionary tale

Selling a house in the UK is incredibly stressful where the odds are always stacked in the buyer's favour and people can mess you about for months. This has happened to me with two different house sales in the UK. In Queensland it's dead easy. You get tied into a contract within a week of making the offer, subject to satisfactory survey, and it is possible to have it all done and dusted with you safely in your new house within four weeks. Australia 1, UK 0.

When immigration gives you the go ahead to drop everything and bugger off to the bottom of the world, DO NOT do what I did in selling a house!

Having decided to leave in January so I could start the Australian academic year, I put my house on the market at the end of September and accepted an offer within a week. By the start of November everything was going well, the survey had been done and we were negotiating what I was going to leave behind. So I booked my flight. The sharp eyed savvy readers amongst you will have noticed a fatal flaw in my plans, ie. 'what if the sale doesn't go through?' I know.

By the end of November my estate agent had received a worrying phone call from the buyer saying that her circumstances had changed, she wasn't sure about going through with the sale and needed a few days to think about it. The estate agent and I agreed that I didn't have a few days to give her and we slapped the house back on the market.

At the end of that week my solicitor contacted me. The buyer's solicitor had rung them to ask why the house was being remarketed as the buyer had not said she didn't want it (?!). The estate agent checked and it transpired that the house sale was going to go through after all. A settlement date was agreed and we took the house back off the market. This was around the 2nd week of December. Did you spot another mistake there?

By Christmas, things had gone quiet again and the buyer was not responding to my emails about furniture and stuff. On the 28th December she emailed the estate agent and I to say that she really didn't want the house at all this time, three months after the sale had been agreed. My flight was booked for 13th January.

I am very fortunate to have a supportive family who stepped into the breach when they sensed that I could be about to have a nervous breakdown. I was even more fortunate to be able to accept another offer on the house within days. So thankfully I was able to get my flight and give my Dad power of attorney over my house sale. And this time it remained on the market until the contract was signed and sealed! The lady who bought it was a lovely local who will make full use of the pub next door (see above photo of lovely Greens Norton, Northants)!

So if your name is Hannah James, you know what I've been talking about, and you've just googled your own name and found yourself famous on the world wide interweb for all the wrong reasons, I hope you are very ashamed of yourself. Although we could speculate all year over whether this could in fact be possible.

OBVIOUSLY the moral of this story is not to make any plans until your buyer signs on the dotted line - duh! And keep your house on the market until then. Any serious buyer will understand why and probably won't object. This should save your time, money and nerves from being wasted by any selfish, useless, lying, two faced, schizophrenic f***wits.