The Modern Schleswig-Holstein Question

To understand buying a house in England, you first need to abandon any notion that agreeing to buy a house means you are, in any meaningful sense, buying a house.

We have a chain.

Person A buys Person B's house, allowing Person B to buy Person C's house, while everybody's money travels upstream like a nervous salmon.

My buyers buy my house. I take that money and buy the house above. Those people leave. That is the entire process. You could explain it to a reasonably bright Labrador using three sausages and a diagram drawn in gravy.

Unfortunately, houses in England are not bought by Labradors.

Once everybody has agreed who is buying what and for how much, absolutely nothing is legally binding. Instead, each party appoints a solicitor whose job is to prevent anything rash happening, such as anybody actually moving any time soon.

The solicitors conduct searches. They raise enquiries. They answer enquiries.

The answers are examined (eventually, and at leisure), and further enquiries are raised about the answers to the previous enquiries.

Occasionally somebody discovers a septic tank and the entire legal profession has to lie down and reach for the smelling salts.

Months pass. Surveys are done. Possessions are packed. Furniture goes into storage. I have mentally moved house approximately seventeen times. Meanwhile, the man at the top of the chain is dying.

One still does not own the house.

At some point everybody must agree on a completion date. There are only three parties. This should be easy.

It is not.

By this point I am losing my fucking mind.

Dates are proposed. Dates are rejected. Someone is going on holiday. Someone hasn't replied. Someone thought someone else was going to reply. Someone at one end of the chain has not been consulted. Someone at the other end has raised a late enquiry about the swoon-inducing septic tank. 

Occasionally a question arrives which suggests the person asking it has not actually looked at the file.

Nobody knows whose turn it is. Except for the one estate agent who phones someone every day at 13.06.

My solicitor knows me so well he is comfortable saying "pissing around". 

My estate agent knows my phone number. I don't even know my phone number.

Everyone signs off with kind regards, which by month four has acquired approximately the same emotional meaning as I know where you live.

Eventually, and theoretically, all three parties become ready at exactly the same moment. The solicitors then exchange contracts.

This is the first point at which any of the people who have sold their houses, bought houses, had surveys, arranged mortgages, hired removals, packed their underwear and spent several months discussing drainage are actually legally obliged to buy or sell anything.

Until then, the transaction exists in a state known as Schrödinger's Sale.

The house is sold. The house is not sold. Everyone has spent money on the assumption that it is sold. Nobody is legally required to behave as though it is sold.

The waveform collapses only when a conveyancing solicitor finally presses send on an email they have been about to send for the previous eight weeks.

Anyone can, at any point before this, stand up and shout ACTUALLY, FUCK THIS and bring the entire structure down.

This is considered a perfectly normal way to organise property ownership.

It is indeed the modern Schleswig-Holstein Question.

Lord Palmerston supposedly said that only three men had ever understood the Schleswig-Holstein Question: one was dead, one had gone mad, and the third had forgotten it.

And this chain has three parties. At the top, one man is dying. In the middle, I am going mad. And at the bottom, after several months of conveyancing, I am no longer entirely convinced they even know what the fucking question is.

So when the estate agent says, "We're nearly there," I suspect this is what he means.