The Purchasers

It took almost a whole week for Moving Made Easy to come back to us with a price.

They came up with the price of £205,000 - which was some way off the £220,000 we thought it was worth. Therefore part exchanging the house would mean we effectively would lose £15,000. We were a little bit a down trodden and said that they could put it on the market (we had nothing to lose and could always pull out). At that stage we weren't quite sure what we were going to do because we knew it was such a bad deal for us,  but we wanted the Redrow house.

So MME put the house on the market with ALL THREE estate agents at the rock bottom price of £205,000. We had two viewings the very next day and then find out that they both had made an offer on the same day. MME decided to make it go to sealed bids.

They called me later that day with the results and they told me that the top bid was £217,000. That didn't sit very well because Moving Made Easy were only going to put £205,000 towards the house based on their offer.

You see, Moving Made Easy effectively buy the house from you in the event you can't get a buyer to enable you to move into the Redrow home. So they could profit or they got lose. So with such a high offer I asked whether we could enter into the contract directly with the buyer and they agreed. MME would still facilitate the deal with the estate agents - for example they paid for the estate agent's fees (over £3,000) and the energy efficiency test (£100).

So this was great - it looked as though the move was going to go ahead and we could then start to get a little more excited. Until the next hurdles: formal approval of our mortgage and exchange of contracts.

MME also arrange for a surveyor to come and give a full survey of your house (not just a home owner's - a full survey!). However, before he even arrived we had sold (well, had an offer) the house directly so it wasn't necessary that he come out. Obviously, this is because MME will effectively buy the house from you in the event your house is slow to sell.

I thought it was quite funny that the couple who had put the offer in on our house was on the basis of a viewing by a loan female and they put the offer in nevertheless based on that viewing. It was the following weekend (after they had already put in the offer) that they viewed together. We were quite nervous that they might change their mind. But it was all okay - he loved it. There's a girl that knows what she wants. I'm not sure that Mr Bee would have allowed me to do that, but I still couldn't believe that he allowed us to reserve the Redrow house. I guess they just go all mushy when they see we want it it so bad.