The process without my ranting

These are an outline of the standard stages when going through the house selling or buying process.

1. The buyer has a mortgage agreed
2. The buyer makes an offer on he house
3. The seller accepts the offer
4. The buyer contacts the mortgage company who then books in the survey
5. The survey is carried out and a report is produced. This is either sent directly to the mortgage company or to the buyer (depends on type of survey and mortgage)
6. The mortgage is finalised based on the outcome of the survey (conditions may be applied)
7. The buyers solicitor undertakes searches with the land registry and various other bodies
8. The sellers solicitors sends documentation to the buyers solicitor (deeds, leases, guarantees on any work carried out)
9. The buyers solicitor responds with any queries (and then the sellers solicitor responds until queries are dealt with)
10. If the buyers solicitor has any queries not fully answered they may report to the mortgage company to confirm that the mortgage company is happy to proceed on this basis.
11. Contract exchange and completion are scheduled in.
    
    

There is no fixed time between each stage. The survey will take up to a month depending on the workload of the surveyor. They should produce the survey within a week and mortgage companies should take around 2 weeks to receive and respond (but have been known to take three months).

Query communication may take around a week for each round of questions but this is dependant on how long it takes for the solicitor to receive, address and respond to queries. Some information may need to be sent to the seller to answer or collate paperwork (details such as the location of services in the house, for example, where the stopcock is or which companies are currently used for utilities). The number of queries will be unique to each sale and depends on the idiosyncrasies of the property and how it is approached by the solicitors involved.