You Have Accepted an Offer. Now What?

Champagne is opened when an offer is accepted, which has always struck me as premature. In England and Wales nothing is binding until exchange of contracts, and the weeks between the two are where a meaningful share of agreed sales quietly die. The offer is half-time, not the whistle.

Here is what actually happens next, and where the risks live.

The paperwork starts

The agent issues a memorandum of sale to both solicitors, confirming the price and the parties, and the legal work begins. Your solicitor prepares the contract pack; the buyer's solicitor raises searches (local authority, drainage, environmental) and, in due course, enquiries: written questions about everything from boundary responsibility to who fitted the boiler.

If you want to move quickly, the single best thing a seller can do is instruct a solicitor before the offer arrives and complete the protocol forms early. Weeks are routinely lost at the start of a transaction simply because nobody has been engaged to open a file.

The survey and the mortgage

The buyer's lender values the property, and most buyers commission their own survey on top. Period Wimbledon housing being what it is, surveys find things: they are paid to. A damp reading here, a roof note there.

This is the first genuine wobble point. The difference between a survey that renegotiates a sale and one that collapses it is usually how the findings are handled: promptly, with evidence, quotes and proportion, rather than defensiveness or silence. An experienced agent earns their fee in this exact week.

Enquiries, and the long quiet middle

Then comes the stretch that tests everyone: solicitors exchanging enquiries, buyers waiting on mortgage offers, and (if there is a chain) every link waiting on the slowest of the others. Silence sets in, and silence is where sales fall apart. A buyer who hears nothing for three weeks starts re-reading the survey, re-checking the portals, and wondering.

This is what sales progression actually is: the unglamorous weekly discipline of chasing every party, translating solicitor-speak for the humans involved, and making sure no one in the chain is quietly stuck. It is the least visible part of an agent's job and the most decisive. When I take a sale on, the person who valued the house is the person doing this chasing, which means nothing gets lost in a handover, because there isn't one.

Exchange, then completion

Exchange of contracts is the legal moment: deposits paid, completion date fixed, both sides bound. Falling through after exchange is vanishingly rare because it now costs real money. Completion (usually one to two weeks later, sometimes the same day) is the mechanical finish: funds move, keys release, and the removals van you booked with slightly nervous optimism turns out to have been a good decision.

The honest summary

From acceptance to completion currently tends to run somewhere between three and five months for a typical transaction, faster with no chain and organised solicitors, slower with either missing. You cannot control all of it. You can control your choice of solicitor, the speed of your own paperwork, and whether the person selling your home treats progression as the job itself rather than the afterthought.

Open the champagne at exchange. It tastes better with the risk removed.

What to do next

If this article has raised questions about your own property, the next step is a calm conversation. I can look at the property, the market evidence and the practical choices in front of you, then give you a clear view of what I would do next.