When Sarah, a 34-year-old veterinarian, and her partner first entered their apartment in downtown Copenhagen, they immediately realized that this is it.
High ceilings, a balcony overlooking a nearby canal and proximity to transport, everything fit the bill.
They decided to make an offer on the same day — January 20 — and it was accepted.
“All documents were completed and removed by January 27th. We could move then if we wanted to,” Sarah says. .
«We agreed with the seller to wait until early March to have more time to prepare.»
On March 6, she and her partner received the keys and opened a bottle of champagne in their new home.
Rory Evans, a 31-year-old office manager living many hundreds of miles away in London, started looking for property around the same time.
< p>He quickly saw what he liked — a 2-room apartment with beautiful parquet floors and good rail links. His offer was accepted on February 6.
But six months later, he has spent more than a thousand pounds on surveyor and lawyer fees and is still not close to moving.
In fact, more and more it's likely that he won't move here at all.
2108 Delay in buying a house in the UK
“It really upset me,” he says.
«It took an incredibly long time for everything to theoretically fall apart at the last minute.»
This is a tale of two systems and a prime example of how, according to some, England's obsolete property buy mode urgently needs a major overhaul in the Continental style.
Evans was told just weeks after his offer was accepted that his seller was buying another property that had tenants with a six-month notice period.
Getting an important piece of information about any planned work in the apartment building was also a challenge.
After several months of waiting and less than two weeks before the scheduled exchange, it finally arrived:
«They revealed £370,000 worth of work that was potentially to happen to the building, which then sparked intense negotiations,” he says. .
Such stories are common in England and Wales, where at least one in three sales fail.
It now typically takes more than four months from offer to completion before potential owners can pick up the keys to their new property.
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According to the data, this is almost twice as much as ten years ago. from Landmark Information Group, a data processing company.
However, in Denmark real estate laws prevent such horror stories.
Mark Lund Andersen, an economist and housing market expert at the Boligøkonomisk Videncenter think tank, argues that buyers and sellers need to make commitments much earlier than in the UK.
“When they find a house and negotiate with the seller, a deal is made. The buyer then has six business days to cancel the transaction if they wish,” he explains.
Theoretically, canceling a transaction even within this six-day period would cost 1% of the transaction price, although there is typically a clause ensuring that this is not applicable.
21 Living conditions for 20-29 year olds
In Sarah's case, when the six-day period expired, she and her partner signed the final sales contract and paid about 5% of the apartment price.
The remaining amount was then transferred on the day of completion.
Unlike in England, someone who sells a house in Denmark must provide independent reports on the condition of the property and the condition of the electrical installation.
Although the rules are slightly different for apartments, where the buyer will usually bring an inspector with him for a re-inspection to identify any deficiencies, it is still the responsibility of the seller to provide all the necessary information from the outset.
“[The seller] must also offer the buyer to pay half of the deal's insurance policy. This is to make sure they are insured if anything critical to the building is found after the sale and needs to be done,” says Andersen.
“The whole process is very fast,” he says. adds.
Beth Rudolph of the UK Transport Association says that immediate access to all important information is why buying a house is much faster in countries like Denmark, Norway and Australia.
“The reason other jurisdictions can do it so quickly is because they have vendor disclosure. They have upfront information that ensures that before a property has a buyer, all information about it is matched,” she says.
In Denmark, a lawyer can sort search results by request. real estate in half a day, as the system is fully digitized.
This eliminates waiting for a response from various authorities about development plans in the area and other information, such as the level of flood risk.
“You've got this weird situation that we don't seem to learn anything from. other jurisdictions, despite the fact that we have been trying to obtain preliminary information for 15 years. And the reason we can't publish it is because we don't get support from the government,” says Rudolf.
“The difficulty is that if you don't authorize it, you can move only as fast as the slowest person in the chain.”
2108 Home Ownership Rates
Simon Brown, chief executive of Landmark Information Group, says there is no single easily identifiable bottleneck slowing sales.
“If the answer was really simple, we wouldn’t have this problem because somebody would have fixed it already,” he says.
“We have an industry that has been largely isolated . So real estate agents, lenders, whether they are banks or building societies, to some extent brokers, transport companies, they are all highly regulated, they all have serious obligations in what they have to do, but they are not necessarily well connected with each other.
“If you then add in the fact that you have an industry that was largely analog, you have a situation where work practices are such that it has become very slow.”
Although digitalization has improved somewhat in As a result of the pandemic, the lack of cooperation between the various parties involved continues to slow down the process. Therefore, many processes, such as money laundering and identity verification, are duplicated.
“The industry as a whole needs to agree that it needs to move faster,” Brown adds.
Scandinavian countries have smaller populations, national digital ID systems and a different legal system than the UK, making quick deals with real estate is more feasible.
But Australia has a similar British legal system and a fairly large population of 26 million people. Still, you can buy property there in four weeks, says Brown, who is from Australia himself.
“When I came here, I couldn't believe it took so long. In fact, when people were talking about networks, I never heard of them,” he says.
It is argued that a more efficient system for selling real estate will benefit the economy in many ways. Making it easier for people to move means resources are used less efficiently, workers can easily take advantage of opportunities, and more money is spent on home improvements.
In Copenhagen, Sarah installed new floors a long time ago, bought a big, bright blue sofa, and now he's about to redo the kitchen.
Evans, who will probably have to move out of the apartment he's been trying to buy since February, has been looking forward to the renovations and is also furnishing his new apartment.
Instead, he will likely be stuck in his current share of the house for many months and face a much higher mortgage rate than before if he finds a new location.
“The biggest hurdle is how long it took he says wearily.
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