Ideally, you should let the estate agent have your solicitor’s details at the point that your sale or purchase is agreed. This means that the paperwork can be issued/reviewed as soon as possible. Don’t worry if you haven’t thought this far ahead though, you can instruct us after the offer has been accepted.

If you know that you require mortgage finance, many Estate Agents will require you to have a mortgage in principle which shows how much money a lender will be prepared to lend you. It is only once an offer has been agreed that you can inform the lender of the purchase price and apply for a mortgage offer.

In principle yes. This is a tight time frame but if the builder provides a full pack of papers on day one and the searches which have to be carried out arrive back in time, this is a workable timescale. Most builders allow a degree of flexibility if the transaction is well progressed and there are perhaps just a few outstanding matters to be dealt with.

A property sale or purchase does not become legally binding until both parties have signed a contract and their solicitors have exchanged (swapped and dated) contracts over the phone. Either party can walk away from the transaction up until this point. You do not exchange contracts until you have carried out a full investigation on the property that you are buying and have received satisfactory replies to any questions which you may have about the property. We should point out here that any questions to be asked must go through solicitors as the contract says that you cannot rely on any information given to you directly by the other party. Completion is the term given to the day that the sale or purchase goes ahead – money is transferred and keys are handed over. Exchange of contracts and completion can take place on the same day but often people will choose to leave a period of around two weeks between exchange and completion. This allows you to make final moving arrangements and finish packing when you know that the sale/purchase is legally bound to go ahead on a date written in to the contract.

A property sale/purchase does not become legally binding until contracts are formally exchanged. Either party can walk away from the transaction with no consequences (save for any of their own costs incurred to date such as legal fees or survey costs) up until this point. Sometimes, somebody will come along and make a higher offer for a property and the seller will accept this offer instead (even if you are weeks/months into the purchase process). If this happens to you as a buyer, you will have been gazumped.