This page describes what happens, in what order, and where each stage tends to go wrong. It is a description of a process, not guidance about any particular purchase; the decisions inside it belong to the people making them and to the professionals they instruct.
Before looking at anything
The order most people use is backwards. They look first, and work out what they can afford afterwards. Doing it the other way round is less enjoyable and considerably more efficient, because the affordable set determines everything else: which areas, which property types, which compromises.
The budget is not the loan. It is the deposit, plus the loan a lender will actually advance, minus the transaction costs that must be paid from the same pot. Those costs are unavoidable and often underestimated: legal fees, search fees, survey fees, land transaction tax where it applies, lender fees, and the removal and immediate repair costs that arrive in the first month.
The stages of a purchase
Establish the budget
Deposit, realistic borrowing capacity and transaction costs are settled before viewing anything. Failure here surfaces later as an offer that cannot be funded.
Search and view
Areas and property types are narrowed. The common failure is searching by price alone and ignoring tenure, condition and running costs.
Offer
A figure is put forward, with the buyer's position stated: chain-free, proceedable, funding arranged. Offers fail on position more often than on price.
Sale agreed
The property comes off the market. In most of the UK nothing is binding yet, which is why this stage has no protection against a higher offer arriving.
Instruct legal work
A conveyancer takes over title, searches and enquiries. Delay here is the single largest cause of slow transactions.
Survey and valuation
The buyer's survey inspects condition; the lender's valuation checks the security. These are separate exercises with different purposes.
Mortgage offer
The lender issues a formal offer, subject to conditions and with an expiry date. Chains often fail because an offer expires before the chain is ready.
Enquiries and renegotiation
Search results, survey findings and title questions are resolved, absorbed or priced in. Sales most often change number here.
Exchange of contracts
The point at which the transaction becomes binding and a completion date is fixed. Before this, either side can walk away.
Completion
Funds transfer, keys are released, and the change of ownership is registered.
Searching without wasting months
Two things make a search efficient. The first is being explicit about which constraints are hard and which are preferences, and writing them down before viewing, because viewing erodes this distinction fast. The second is understanding running costs, which differ enormously between apparently similar homes: heating a poorly insulated detached house, service charges on a flat, or the maintenance liability of a large old roof.
Tenure deserves particular attention. Freehold, leasehold and commonhold arrangements produce different obligations, different costs and different resale characteristics. Where a lease is involved, its remaining length and the terms of any ground rent and service charge are part of the purchase, not a detail.
The offer, and why position beats price
An offer communicates two things: a number and a position. Position means whether the buyer can actually proceed, how quickly, and how likely they are to survive the next three months. A seller weighing a marginally higher offer from a buyer at the top of a four-link chain against a lower offer from someone chain-free is making a rational judgement about probability, not being difficult.
The middle, where transactions actually die
Between agreement and exchange there are usually two to four months in which nothing visible happens and any of several parallel processes can fail: legal enquiries raise something unexpected in the title, a search reveals a liability, the survey identifies a defect large enough to change the number, the lender's valuation comes in below the agreed price, or someone further along the chain changes their mind.
The two most useful behaviours in this period are unglamorous: instruct the legal work immediately rather than after the survey, and keep the chain informed. Most delays are queueing delays, and queues respond to being started earlier.
Exchange and completion
Exchange is the moment the transaction becomes real: the contract is binding and the completion date is fixed. Completion is the mechanical transfer, and typically happens days or weeks later, though the two can be same-day.
Between exchange and completion the property is committed but not yet occupied, and the buyer's practical tasks belong to that window: insurance from exchange, utilities and services arranged, removal booked, and the funds in the right account in time.
After the keys
The first month reveals things no survey does: how the heating actually performs, where the noise comes from, how the light moves through the rooms, what the street does at eight in the morning. It is also when deferred repairs identified in the survey should be scheduled rather than forgotten, because they rarely become cheaper.