What actually happens between offer accepted and completion
The short answer
In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, an accepted offer binds nobody. Either side can walk away, without penalty, right up until contracts are exchanged. Scotland is different and commits you much earlier.
Expect two to four months, often longer in a chain. Anyone giving you a confident date before exchange is guessing.
You spend real money before anything is certain. Searches and a survey are paid for in the first few weeks and are gone if the purchase falls through.
Most delays are not your solicitor being slow. They are waiting on someone else, and knowing who makes chasing far more effective.
The thing nobody tells you clearly
An offer being accepted feels like the decisive moment. The agent congratulates you, the property is marked sold subject to contract, and it is natural to assume the hard part is over.
Legally, almost nothing has happened. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the agreement is not binding on anybody. The seller can accept a higher offer next week. You can change your mind. Neither of you owes the other anything, and neither of you gets back what has already been spent.
That state of affairs continues for weeks or months, until exchange of contracts. Understanding this early is worth doing, partly so the risk is not a surprise, and partly because it explains why everyone involved is in such a hurry to get to exchange.
What the weeks are actually filled with
The period is not dead time. Several processes run in parallel, mostly out of your sight, and the one that finishes last determines when you exchange.
The week numbers are a shape rather than a schedule. A chain-free purchase with a cooperative seller can move considerably faster, and a leasehold flat in a chain of four can take twice as long.
Where the delays actually come from
Buyers tend to blame their own solicitor, who is usually the one person visibly doing something. The real causes are more often elsewhere, and identifying which applies to you is the difference between useful chasing and irritating everyone.
| Cause | What is really going on |
|---|---|
| Search turnaround | Local authority searches are processed by the council, and how long they take varies enormously between councils. Your conveyancer cannot speed this up. Some will offer search indemnity insurance as a way around waiting, if your lender accepts it. |
| The leasehold pack | Managing agents charge for the information pack and are not in any hurry. On a leasehold purchase this is one of the commonest single causes of delay, and it starts only when the seller requests it. |
| Enquiries going back and forth | Each round takes days. A missing building regulations certificate, an unclear boundary or an unexplained extension can generate several rounds on its own. |
| The chain | Everyone exchanges on the same day, so the whole chain moves at the pace of its slowest link, which may be four transactions away from you and entirely invisible. |
| The mortgage offer | A full application can raise questions that the agreement in principle never touched, and a down valuation restarts a conversation about price. |
| Something found in the survey | Damp, subsidence, a roof or electrics can lead to specialist reports, quotes and renegotiation, none of which is quick. |
Why the full application is a different thing entirely, and the changes that can quietly invalidate what you were told before.
When the money is actually needed
The costs do not arrive in one lump at the end, which catches people who have saved exactly the deposit and nothing more.
Early, and non-refundable: searches, usually within the first few weeks, and your survey if you are having one. Some conveyancers ask for money on account at the start. All of this is spent whether or not you complete.
At exchange: the deposit, conventionally around 10% of the purchase price, though a lower figure is sometimes negotiated. This is a different thing from your mortgage deposit, and it has to be with your conveyancer in cleared funds before exchange can happen.
At or shortly after completion: the balance of the purchase price from your lender and your own funds, the legal fees, Land Registry fees, and the property tax, which falls due within a short window after completion and cannot be added to the mortgage.
Add it all up True cost of buying calculatorEvery cash cost of a purchase in one place, including the ones that arrive before you own anything. Nothing you enter is stored or transmitted.
Gazumping, and the money you cannot get back
Because nothing binds until exchange, a seller is free to accept a better offer from someone else. The practice has a name, gazumping, and it is lawful in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
What makes it painful is not the lost house but the lost spending. Searches, survey and legal work to that point are gone. The reverse also happens: a buyer reducing their offer shortly before exchange, knowing the seller is committed and under pressure, which is called gazundering.
Scotland works differently
If you are buying in Scotland, much of the above does not apply, and the difference is substantial rather than cosmetic.
Offers are submitted formally through a solicitor rather than verbally through an agent, and are usually made after you have seen the home report, which the seller provides and which includes a survey and valuation. That removes the commonest reason for a survey surprise later.
Once offers and counter-offers are settled and missives are concluded, the agreement is binding, and this happens much earlier in the process than exchange does elsewhere. Gazumping is therefore rare after that point, though it remains possible before it. The trade-off is that you commit sooner, with less opportunity to change your mind, so the groundwork needs doing before you offer rather than after.
Northern Ireland follows the broad pattern of England and Wales, with its own professional conventions and its own property tax treatment.
What you can usefully do
Most of this process is out of your hands, which is frustrating. A few things genuinely help.
- Instruct your conveyancer the day the offer is accepted, and return their identity paperwork immediately. Nothing starts until that is done, and it is the one delay entirely within your control.
- Submit the full mortgage application straight away rather than waiting to see whether the purchase feels real. If it is going to raise a problem, you want to know in week two rather than week eight.
- Reply to your solicitor the same day. A form sitting in your inbox for a week is a week added to the transaction.
- Ask where the hold-up is, specifically. "Any update?" produces nothing. "Which enquiry are we waiting on, and who has it?" produces an answer you can act on, including pressing the agent to chase the other side.
- Change nothing financially. No new credit, no job moves if avoidable, no missed payments. Your lender will look again before releasing funds.
- Do not book removals or hand in notice before exchange. This is the mistake that turns a delay into a genuine problem, and it is made constantly.
A note on expectations
Transactions fall through, and more often than most buyers expect. That is not a reason to be pessimistic, but it is a reason to treat the period before exchange as provisional, and to avoid committing money or arrangements that depend on a date nobody has yet fixed.
It is also worth knowing that the people involved are not being obstructive. Conveyancing is slow because it involves several organisations that do not answer to each other, and a chain multiplies that. Understanding the cause does not speed anything up, but it does make the wait considerably less maddening.