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Comment by zik | Hacker News Reader

Coming from Australia the way London house sales work seems like such a complete disaster. It seems like you can make your buy contingent on selling your old house, which creates chains of buys and sells which fail the instant anyone pulls out. I can't imagine how anyone can operate in that environment.

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That is quite normal in Denmark as well. Part of the reason is that the bank cannot approve of the deal, if you have not sold your old house. So either you sell your house and move into a rented apartment, or you commit to buy a house if you can get your old sold in some specified timeframe. Usually the sellers realtor advice the seller if the house is likely to sell or not at a given price.

You can make your offer contingent on selling your old house (or on an inspection, or anything else you want). Sellers are also free to not accept such offers. Both of my house purchases were from submitting a no financing contingency offer with significant earnest money, and I think that helped me win both bids.

Yes, for sure. Even if you are coming in 10k or 20k under others, having a 0 contingent offer is so much more clean and more likely to get approved. My last offer I went even further and added a note "I know both the roof and HVAC are old and ruined, I will not ask for either to be fixed as part of closing" and I won the house despite not being the highest bid.

Perhaps different today, but back when I lived in the auld country it was totally different in Scotland (still in the UK, I believe).

As I suspect you know, Scotland has a distinct legal system from England & Wales, and large differences to England in laws around house buying & selling in particular.

There's still the 'offers over xxx,000' blind auction, but gazumping which is allowed in England (still I believe) is not in Scotland, and a good thing too.

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