Mortgage AIP, offer accepted

A question about : Mortgage AIP, offer accepted

I'm a first time buyer and have had an offer on a house accepted, been speaking to a mortgage adviser and got an AIP in place.

I have had quotes from solicitors and am going to select one today and let them know. Then I will tell the estate agents who the solicitor is.

Should I be applying for the mortgage now? Or should I wait until I've had the survey done?

At what stage should I be getting a surveyor? How do I find a surveyor? I can ask for recommendations from colleagues, friends and family as I did when selecting a solicitor, but is there a better method?

I've been looking at house purchasing timelines online but they each seem to say something different so I'm not sure how to proceed now! Things seem to overlap too.

Best answers:

• Hi there,
  I'm just going through this process myself. Here's what I did:
  * asked for quotes from solicitors as part of offer and choose who we'd use. (This was a condition imposed by our vendor). We knew the solicitor we wanted to use at a very early stage but have yet to give them any money!
  * apply for mortgage as soon as offer accepted (I did mine online and there was a bit of faffing around sending documents in and calling the building society etc). This application included a basic valuation done by the mortgage company. Took ~3 weeks to process.
  * Once basic valuation done (within a couple of days of mortgage application being submitted), instructed chartered surveyor to do a full building survey. You could get a homebuyer's report instead at cheaper cost, but the house we're interested in has had lots of work done on it - and we're super risk averse. We used the RICS website (https://www.rics.org/us/) to choose local surveyors with decent websites and wrote to 4 of them asking for quotes. We went with the surveyor who gave us the most information in return, although he wasn't the cheapest. Survey took a week to organise and another week to await the report.
  * Next step: hand over money to the solicitor and ask them to start searches. We'll do this once we've had a chance to chat to the surveyor and discuss the report (hoping for a phone call today!).
  NB - this is the course of events that worked best for us as buyers, but it's put us under HUGE pressure from the vendor, their estate agent and even our own solicitor to move more quickly. Many people leap into housebuying and start everything moving at the same time. This is certainly faster, but cost us a lot of money as a strategy in the past when we withdrew from a purchase as a result of poor survey findings.
  My thinking is that only the survey could tell me what I really needed to know about the house to be sure I wanted to buy it, so getting that done was a priority for me.
  You should also know we're FTB buying a house with no chain. If a chain had been involved, I think I'd have wanted more information on how that was forming before handing cash over to anyone.
• Once you've instructed a solicitor the EA will circulate everyone's contacts so things can get started.
  You will make your mortgage application, with your broker helping out. The mortgage company will say when they are ready to do their valuation. Sometimes this is straightaway, others do all the credit checks on you first then check over the house afterwards. If you want a more in depth survey, your broker can often arrange this as the same surveyor can do both. However they do not always offer this. You might need to appoint your own surveyor. Indeed, you can do this instead anyway if you prefer, but it's likely to be cheaper via the mortgage surveyor as he is there anyway.
  While you're doing all this, your seller will be filling in all the paperwork for the sale, and their solicitor will prepare the draft contract, which your solicitor will pass on to you, probably once you get your mortgage offer.
• 1st job: a trip to the local library. If you walk there it won't cost you a penney!
  Borrow a book on house buying and it will answer the Qs you've asked, plus 235 other Qs you have not yet asked but soon will.