Question about mortgage deposit(s)

Lucky you. Oops no, I meant silly you for committing to a purchase without a pre-existing loan offer which you had duly accepted. It goes without saying that a loan offer, once accepted, is irrevocable and can have no further conditions added.

I don't doubt sentence 2, but nevertheless I don't buy sentence 1.

You're one confused individual. It is extremely rare for a funeral to kill the person whose funeral it is. There is an affliction, ?catatonia?, sometimes misdiagnosed as death, and they put you in a coffin and if you're lucky you wake up during the funeral and kick up enough of a rumpus so they let you out.

"Ronald Raygun" wrote

... and may make it exceedingly difficult for someone to sell when they don't have other funds to prop-up the kitty. What are they meant to do?

In most contracts it is a condition precedent that the initial payment must be received by the vendor before the contract becomes effective. No initial payment, no contract. There may be other conditions as well.

Or I suppose they could rent it to the prospective buyer temporarily, for long enough for both parties to save up the kitty money.

Raygun, you talk the biggest load of codswallop that side of hadrians wall. Pitty it can't be "rebuilt" and applied to the internet.

That's true, in fact I was renting before I bought and I did overlap them. But if you complete the purchase and the sale then falls through you are left in serious trouble, with a very expensive bridging loan, so that gives a buyer a lot of leverage - probably if I'd dropped my offer price by £10k they would still have had to accept.

I think the agents thought I (or my solicitor) was being slow and were trying to hurry me up - in fact it turned out to be the vendor's solicitors who were slow.