England must ditch its deranged house-selling process and go Dutch

England’s house-selling system is unbelievably stupid.

And the insanity of it becomes even clearer when you’ve experienced the much simpler and more sensible Dutch process.

I’ve got strong feelings on this because my house sale in England fell through today. And the nightmare of the last few months was a very stark contrast to my experience buying, then selling, three properties in the Netherlands. Those six transactions were a fraction of the stress of this single attempted English sale, even though large parts of them involved paperwork that was in Dutch.

The Netherlands’ system is better because you agree the price and the date to hand over the keys and… basically, that’s it.

There are no conveyancing lawyers or endless letters between them. No delayed “exchange” stage. No months of uncertainty over whether or not the sale will actually go ahead or when you can book movers. No way buyers can pull out at the very last minute without penalty or start messing around changing the offer price or date. Also there’s no nonsense for the buyer either, such as the seller suddenly changing their mind and staying or deciding to sell to someone else who suddenly turned up with a higher offer.

Oh, and as an extra bonus there’s also there’s vastly less chance of the sale being a chain at all — let alone one that collapses at the last minute cancelling all the sales (which is what happened to us today).

For most people in England that’s all you need to hear to demand we switch systems, so it’s fine to stop reading now.

But if you really want more detail…

The speedy way it works in NL

In the Netherlands the deal is mostly handled by “makelaars”, who are like better-informed estate agents. They can act for a seller or for a buyer, in the latter case often visiting properties that are not sold via their agency.

The seller finds a makelaar to sell their house then fills out a selling pack and uploads ID documents. Each time I did this all the documents were on the same single easy-to-use online platform Move.NL (which is way better than the dated dysfunctional sites used by English conveyancers).

The selling pack is a bit more detailed on its questions than the English ones especially if you have a flat in a house partly owned by others, but it is consistently the same document. So if you dig out one on a property from a previous time it was sold many of the answers may be the same.

The week my Utrecht flat sold is not entirely typical, but I saw other properties sell similarly quickly. It went roughly like this:

Monday — My makelaar contacted other local makelaars who might already have buyers interested in my kind of flat to give them priority on booking visits.

Tuesday — The flat went up on Funda.nl, which is the Dutch equivalent of RightMove or Zoopla except, efficiently, everyone tends to use the same one.

Wednesday & Thursday — Interested buyers visited the flat (normally arriving with their makelaars to be let in by my makelaar).

Friday — We were able to set a deadline that afternoon for offers and received a few good ones, so I accepted the best. We then agreed a date to handover the key.

After that the makelaars spoke to each other and proposed a local notary to use for the final stage.

A sales contract was drawn up in the two weeks after and signed by both parties with the price and date set out in it. A further date was set for a few weeks later for the buyer to put down a 10% deposit, which they did.

In the final weeks before the sale I corresponded directly with the buyer via friendly emails about which furniture they did or didn’t want to keep and shared some local bakery recommendations.

On the morning of the sale my makelaar let the buyer and their makelaar into the flat to show it was still standing and to take photos together of the readings on the electricity, gas and water meters.

They then went straight to the notary’s office to sign the final documents which ensured the property was in the buyer’s name in the land registry (some Dutch people like to get a souvenir photo of this moment).

The buyer then received all the keys and owned the place. Within a matter of hours their payment for the flat had landed in my account. Done.

Questions you may have

“But hang on — when did the buyer do a survey?”

In this case they didn’t. I always did one out of British habit and to be prepared for problems I might find later. And buyers of older buildings in places such as Amsterdam or Haarlem will do a “bouwkundige keuring” (technical inspection). But not all Dutch people do, and in nearly every case I bought the final price was agreed before a survey could have been completed.

“But what if a buyer finds a major problem after the survey?”

As I understood it, It would have to be a substantially major issue to re-open the process after the memorandum of sale had been done. So something of the house-falling-down variety, not a line in the survey saying the upstairs windows could do with replacing. And — more importantly- it would need to be something the seller had been misleading about in the sellers’ pack. If that’s the case, then it is the seller who is in trouble.

“This massively better process must be more expensive then?”

No — it’s actually significantly cheaper as a seller.

Despite the fact the makelaar seems to do much more work than an English estate agent the percentage they get paid from a sale is lower. I paid my makelaar 1.7% of the sales cost whereas I’ll need to pay around 3% if my estate agent sells my house in London.

More importantly you’re also not having to pay a conveyancing lawyer. You do pay the notary for their work, but again this is much cheaper (the notary costs came to €105, about £88, whereas my current conveyancing bill in England will end up at least 30 times that).

And all the work totting up the costs against the proceeds from the sale is done by the notary who turns it into a single clear final bill for the whole process.

As a buyer it may be a bit more expensive as you may likely buy via a makelaar too for ease or early access to property viewings (though this is not compulsory) in which case you also need to pay your makelaar a 1% percentage on your purchase. But, again, if they and the notary are together covering the conveyancing side it may still work out cheaper depending on the price of the property. And there’s a peace-of-mind bonus for the buyer knowing their purchase is more locked-in as well, allowing them to take more time to plan movers and so on without surprises, or wasting money on a survey only to get gazumped.

“OK — but what did you mean by claiming the Dutch don’t do chains??”

The Dutch seem to insist on sprucing up the decor of houses and flats before they move in to an extent that British people may find surprising. When I first bought a home in Utrecht my neighbours thought it a bit odd that I just wanted to move in on the day as they usually took several weeks to at least repaint the place. Even some relatively young Dutch people I spoke with had done this and were surprised I hadn’t.

The Dutch banks and mortgage providers treat it as the default that home-owners who are buying again will have several weeks — maybe months — of cross-over period when they’ll own two properties. So they automatically start to discuss how the bridging loans will work. This is all underpinned by the facts that:

1) the Dutch property market is a seller’s market, so they more comfortably assume you’ll sell your home in the not-too-distant future;

2) mortgages in the Netherlands can be up to 100% of the property value.

The assumption I therefore heard repeated several times in the Netherlands is that as a home-owner you should have an offer accepted to buy a new house before even starting to try to sell your current one

Again, that is not to say that chains never exist in the Netherlands. There can be preconditions added to sales, including the precondition of the buyer getting the mortgage (the so called ‘voorbehoud van financiering’) and that of the buyer selling a previous piece of property (‘voorbehoud van verkoop van de eigen woning’). But even with the latter, that doesn’t necessarily result in the equivalent of the domino-effect in England’s chains, where everything needs to happen on the same day, because of the availability of bridging loans.

What are the downsides?

I can’t see any downsides personally to the Dutch house-selling process itself, certainly not compared to the English one. We should just copy it right now, perhaps with some lessons from the Scottish system thrown is as that’s somewhere between the two and closer to home.

However, on the specific side issue of the “no chains” culture, I do recognise that — while that’s also brilliant as a seller — it is a sign of potential negatives for a buyer.

Essentially it can exist in the Netherlands because demand reliably outstrips supply. That has been caused by a range of factors, including that it’s the most densely populated country in the world, but right-wing politicians prefer to claim it is all the fault of foreigners (like, er, me). And the fear that immigrants are taking houses is, I understand, a key factor in why the bouffant-haired Islamophobic racist Geert Wilders did shockingly well with young voters in last year’s Dutch elections.

But returning to England (as Wilders and company will be happy I did)…

Back in the UK

Until this morning I thought I’d be in my new house in south London in very good time for Christmas. The memorandum of sale was issued about two months ago, setting out a proposed exchange date this week and a proposed completion and moving date next week, so I’d provisionally booked movers.

Now it looks like we won’t be moving until some point next year, if ever.

The sale collapsed, not because of our buyers, but because our buyer’s buyer’s parents decided they didn’t like an aspect of their son’s potential new flat. So today we found out that all the sales in the chain were off and we’re back to square one.

This isn’t unusual: more than a third of chains in England collapse. But it’s still exasperating.

I realise the tale of some guy who has been lucky to own properties in more than one country — and is now selling a house in London, of all places — is unlikely to get sympathy with anyone struggling to buy any kind of home at all, especially Millennials and Gen Zs.

But the UK house-buying-and-selling system is going to be stupid and unreasonably expensive for them as well. As they’ll find out if they sink up to £1,000 on a survey, or pay to put all their possessions into storage, or agree to give up living in a rented flat on a cetain date, or all of the above, only for the seller to change their mind at the last minute.

I asked a former MP at the weekend why the situation was so daft and he explained that, to their credit, the Labour party had attempted to improve it back in the Blair era. But the attempt had been stymied by the legal lobbies that benefited if conveyancers and others continued with the expensive and complicated process.

Despite this, I hope the new Labour government will try again.

Moving house is a stressful enough life change in its own right. That stress should not be made multiple times worse because of England sticking with a process that is undeniably stupid.

So let’s ditch it and go Dutch.