Exchange of contracts is the formal dating and swapping of identical contracts, one signed by the pruchaser and one by the vendors. If the full deposit hasn't already been paid it is paid at this time.

Exchange can take place immediately the sale has been negotiated in the agent's office or it could be handled by the solicitors. The method used will depend on yourselves, your purchaser and the agent.

Agent exchange

If the agent exchanges the contract, the buyer has 5 business days after the date of the contract to make their pre-purchase property checks and arrange finance. Within those 5 days they can cool off and not proceed with the purchase if they wish, otherwise, at the end of the cooling off you have an unconditional sale which will proceed to settlement in around 6 weeks.

Agent exchange speeds up the sale process and results in less "fall overs" so we recommend and support agents in exchanging the contracts themselves in the majority of cases.

Solicitor exchange

There are a nubmer of situations when agent exchange is not possible. The reasons for this include:

• You want to find another property yourself before committing to your sale,
• The agent is not comfortable exchanging contracts and prefers to leave it to the solicitors,
• The purchase is waiting for an unconditional exchange of their sale.
• The purchser's solicitor is not supportive of agent exchange,
• There are other considerations that make agent exchange inpractical such as purchase options, development site, etc.

Whatever the reason, it will take on average between 10 and 20 days to achieve an unconditional solicitor exchange.

Your agent will forward details of the sale to us so we can complete the contract and forward it to the purchaser's solicitor. They will do their pre-purchase inspections such as pest and building and survey and, when they are ready, send the contract and 10% deposit to us for exchange.

This whole process usually takes between 10 and 20 days.

Sold by

Once contracts are unconditionally exchanged your agent will put the sold by sign up and you can start packing and preparing for your move.

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