Buying a home, step by step
The process has a fixed order and a small number of genuine decision points. Most of the anxiety it produces comes from not knowing which stage you are actually in.
An offer, in England and Wales, commits nobody to anything. Until contracts are exchanged, either side may walk away for any reason or none, and no compensation is due. This one fact explains almost everything that people find strange about buying a house here: the long period of expensive uncertainty, the vulnerability to a change of mind, and the pressure everyone feels to move quickly through stages that cannot actually be hurried.
What an accepted offer does achieve is administrative. The property is usually marked as under offer or sold subject to contract, the agent issues a memorandum of sale setting out the agreed price and the parties, and each side's conveyancer begins work. From this point there are two processes running in parallel: a legal one, investigating what exactly is being sold, and a financial one, establishing that the money will be there.
The legal process
Your conveyancer obtains the register of title and the title plan, receives a contract pack and a set of standard property forms from the seller's side, orders searches, and raises enquiries about anything unclear. The point of all this is not paperwork for its own sake. It is to establish that the seller can sell what they say they are selling, that nothing attached to the land will surprise you, and that no obligation you cannot live with comes with it.
Enquiries are where transactions slow down. A missing building regulations certificate for a decade-old extension, an unclear boundary responsibility, a shared drain, a covenant restricting alterations, a lease with an unhelpful clause — each of these has to be raised, sent to the seller, answered, and often answered again. None of it is difficult; all of it is sequential, and each round trip costs days.
The financial process
If you are borrowing, the lender will instruct its own valuation. This is done for the lender's benefit, to confirm that the property is adequate security for the loan. It is not a survey, it does not protect you, and in many cases nobody visits the inside of the house. A satisfactory valuation, together with the underwriting of your income and outgoings, produces a formal mortgage offer. That offer has an expiry date, which is one of the few genuine deadlines in the process.
Your own inspection of the building is a separate decision and a separate cost. It is dealt with in full on the surveys page; the point to hold here is only that it should be commissioned early enough that its findings can still be used, and that a purchase decided entirely on a lender's valuation has had no independent examination of the fabric at all.
Exchange and completion
Exchange is the hinge of the whole process. Contracts are formally exchanged, a deposit is paid, a completion date is fixed, and both parties become legally bound. In a chain every link must exchange on the same day, which is why exchange is so often delayed by a party several transactions away from you whom you will never meet.
Completion follows, usually a week or two later, occasionally on the same day. Funds are transferred, the seller's outstanding mortgage is redeemed, keys are released, and the property becomes yours. Afterwards the conveyancer files the tax return on the purchase and registers the change of ownership, which is the point at which the public record catches up with reality.
What actually causes delay
In practice delays cluster in a few places: waiting for a local authority search, waiting for a lender's underwriting, waiting for a seller to find a document about work done years ago, waiting for a leaseholder's management pack, and waiting for the slowest party in a chain. Very little of this is within any one buyer's control. What is within your control is responding to your own conveyancer's requests immediately, ordering your survey early, and having your finance arranged before you offer rather than after.
It is also worth being honest about the emotional shape of the process. The point of maximum stress is usually the fortnight before exchange, when a great deal of money has been spent and nothing is yet secure. Knowing that this is a structural feature of the system rather than a sign that something has gone wrong makes it considerably easier to sit through.