The short answer is that it takes far longer than anybody tells you at the start, and almost none of the extra time is spent finding a buyer.
Finding a buyer is the fast part
A well-priced house in a normal market finds a buyer in weeks. That part is visible, it feels like progress, and it is the part estate agents talk about.
Then an offer is accepted, and everything goes quiet.
The waiting happens after the offer
Between an accepted offer and a completed sale, a chain of people each wait for one another:
- Your conveyancer waits for you to return the property forms and your ID checks.
- The searches are ordered, and the local authority takes as long as it takes.
- The buyer's lender waits for a valuation, then for the survey, then for its own paperwork.
- The buyer's conveyancer raises enquiries, and yours answers them - each round trip taking days.
- Everybody in the chain waits for the slowest person in it.
None of these steps is hard. What makes them slow is that nobody owns the whole thing. Each party does its bit correctly and then hands over, and the hand-over is where the week goes.
Selling after a death adds one more wait
If the house is being sold as part of an estate, the sale cannot complete without the grant of probate. That is the step people most often misunderstand, so it is worth being precise:
You can market the house and accept an offer before probate is granted. You cannot complete without it.
So the grant only delays you if you waited for it before starting. Marketing the house while the probate application is in progress runs the two timelines side by side instead of end to end, and that alone routinely saves months.
What you can actually control
Three things, and they are all at the beginning:
- Get the paperwork ready before you go on the market. Every document you have ready is an enquiry that gets answered in an hour instead of a fortnight.
- Order the searches early rather than after an offer is accepted.
- Instruct your conveyancer at the same time as your agent, not after you have a buyer. Most people do this the other way round and lose weeks to it.
Why we do both jobs
We sell the house and do the conveyancing, and the legal work starts while the house is still on the market rather than after an offer. There is no hand-over between the agent and the solicitor, because there is no gap between them to hand over across.
That is not a promise about your particular sale - chains and lenders are outside anyone's control. It removes the delays that are inside it.