Nicola Kelland - Settlement day

Once your house is sold and the deposit paid, you can start planning for the big moving day. Moving day can be very stressful as often, one household is moving out of one property and into their new home on the same day. Therefore, others are doing the same on the same day and a whole chain reaction takes place. This process often creates a logistical nightmare, with moving trucks and owners all juggling position to get into their new homes.

A bit of planning can help. Talk to your solicitor about the timing of your settlement on your new house and also about the settlement of yours. Your settlement on your new house will probably be dependent on what time of the day the funds come through from the sale of your home. If it is late in the day, then your new home purchase will be late as well. With some communication between the solicitors, they can often arrange a suitable time to both parties, and unless anything unforeseen happens on the day, the transaction can run very smoothly.

Some of our purchasers choose to settle a day prior and others even a week early just to enable them to have a relatively relaxed transition between their old property and their new property. Obviously, this requires you to have the funds in hand to enable you to settle on your new property before you receive the proceeds from your existing home. There is an element of risk attached to this, as what will you do, if for any reason, the sale proceeds from your home get held up, or your purchaser has difficulty paying? Certainly, it can make the whole moving day process less stressful, but get some legal advice first.

Keys
Talk to your real estate salesperson about the keys, access codes and alarm codes for your new property before settlement day. In a lot of cases, the real estate office will be given the keys to hand over to you. But they are not allowed to give them to a new purchaser until they have received notification from the vendor, or the vendor’s solicitor in writing, that the property has settled. This often creates frustration and stress for purchasers as they wait for keys, with moving trucks sitting outside on the road clocking up hourly costs. In many cases, their own home has been settled so they have had to get out and are, in effect, in no man’s land until notification is received.

Cleaning
Same day settlements often make it difficult for cleaning, as you have barely moved all the boxes and furniture out when the truck coming in is arriving to start unpacking the new owner’s furniture. I highly recommend getting 90% of the cleaning done prior to moving day, and then all that is required is cleaning floors, bathrooms and the kitchen. There are some great companies that will do the cleaning for you, just make sure they are going to have enough time.

Good luck, and I hope you have a stress free moving day!