Sellers assume the pace is set by the buyer. It is mostly set by how quickly the seller can answer questions — and every one of those questions is knowable in advance. This is the one part of a house move genuinely within your own control.
Assemble the File Before You Go to Market
Title documents, which are frequently held by your lender where there is a mortgage — requesting them takes time, and starting now costs nothing. Planning permission and certificates of compliance for anything built or altered: extension, attic conversion, garage conversion, conservatory. The Building Energy Rating certificate. Local Property Tax up to date, and management company charges if it is an apartment or a managed estate. Mortgage details for redemption. And for rural property, whatever exists on the septic tank, the well and access. All of that exists to make one stage go quickly: requisitions on title, the standard set of formal questions the buyer’s solicitor raises covering ownership, boundaries, planning, services, taxes, disputes and occupancy. The answers become part of the contractual position, and this is precisely where an unprepared seller loses weeks — because each unanswered question means locating a document, writing to a local authority, or finding the engineer who did the work fifteen years ago.
The Two Situations That Change Everything
An extension built without permission. Common, and not necessarily fatal — but it must be dealt with rather than hoped past, because the buyer’s solicitor will require a certificate of compliance and their lender will insist on it. Depending on what was built, when, and its size, it may be exempted development needing no permission, it may be capable of certification by an engineer or architect, or it may need regularising. Some situations resolve slowly and a small number do not resolve at all. Establish which you are in before a buyer’s solicitor establishes it for you. A sale out of an estate. Entirely routine in Kilkenny and a different transaction: the authority to sell must be in place, a grant of representation is usually a prerequisite with its own timeline, beneficiaries may need to consent, and where the deceased held unregistered title or the title has not been dealt with in a generation there is more work again. These sales run far better where the estate and the conveyancing are handled together rather than by two advisers each waiting on the other. Finally, on closing: your mortgage is redeemed out of the proceeds, the charge released, and the balance accounted for to you — and where you are buying simultaneously, the coordination of funds and keys on the same day is the most delicate part of the whole exercise.
Thinking of Selling This Year?
The most useful conversation happens before you list. Tell us what you have and what you cannot find - the gaps are usually fixable in the time it takes to sell.
Call 01 5827148