Sale likely to collapse for 3rd time
This is more a rant to get it off my chest than anything else, but also any tips or advice welcome!
We bought our house (3 bed semi in zone 3 London) for £710k in 2017.
We listed it this February at £785k. We've done a lot of work to it (kitchen, bathrooms (1 added and 1 reno'd), insulated, garden done etc) so we'd hoped for more, but it is what it is! The estate we're on is very variable. Every hosue started the same in the early/mid 1900s, but now vary in size and shape as people have done work to them, and houses are listed from 600k to 1.1m.
We got a good stream of initial viewings, probably about 16 viewings between Feb and mid March. However at least half of those had feedback such as "it's in the wrong postcode" or "there's not enough bedrooms". Why must people (viewers and our estate agent alike) waste our time, it wasn't going to have grown legs since listing!
We eventually got an offer at list price after 5 weeks! All very quick, literally viewing on day 1, offer same day, level 3 survey on day 2. Day 3 at 10am she sent a bunch of enquiries (such as asking for building regs for work done on the house in the 1960s, when said regs did not exist...) Whilst we were looking to get information together (whilst working our full time jobs too) at 5pm that day she pulled out, citing lack of response as a problem. The estate agents later let us know she had form for pulling out of properties...
Another 8 or so viewings over a couple of weeks, we get 2 more offers, and after negotiation got to 750k cash from one buyer, or 780k mortgaged but chain free and qualified from another. We of course accepted the 780! However, a week goes by, and no sales memorandum. Another couple of days later, they come back and say they can actually only offer 760k because they "did their maths wrong" and do actually have another property to sell which has been valued lower than they thought...
After a bit more negotiation we accept that offer. Another week later with no progress, we are informed that circumstances have changed and they can no longer buy a house at all in that price range, and they pull out.
We ask if there's been other interest in that past 2 weeks. The other offer we'd received of cash at 750 have now bought another property. Our EA also informs us they'd been treating ours as sold (despite not even having a sales memo or written offer!!) and so they hadn't been processing interest.
So now 10 weeks since listing, we were back where we'd started and trying to get new viewings.
We've had 6 more viewings, and now get another offer!
After a bit of negotiation, we get to £760k. We have accepted this, 8 working days ago, and have a sales memo again, but still not much progress. Apparently the buyer is an international buyer, and all communications via solicitor are done by translator, which goes very slowly. Given the lack of progress, and our past experiences, we're very cynical that it's going to fail again. We also believe this latest potential buyer is a developer who will likely gut out all the things we've done to our house lovingly, but as this point we do just need to get our house sold so we can move on as planned!
So i guess, fingers crossed?