Exchange of contracts is the point of no return in an English or Welsh property purchase. Before exchange, either side can walk away without penalty. After it, you are legally bound to complete — and if you cannot, you forfeit your 10% deposit and can be sued for losses on top. That asymmetry is why everything on this list gets confirmed before you sign, not discovered after.
The money items
1. Your mortgage offer is issued, correct, and will not expire
Not the decision in principle — the formal offer, checked line by line: correct property, correct price, correct product and rate, and any special conditions understood. Mortgage offers expire, typically after three to six months. If completion could slip past the expiry date (chains and leaseholds make this common), talk to your broker about an extension before exchange. Exchanging with an offer that lapses before completion is how buyers end up legally obliged to complete with no funding.
2. The deposit is cleared funds with your solicitor
The exchange deposit — usually 10% of the price — must be sitting in your solicitor's client account, cleared, before exchange can happen. If part of it is a gift, the gift letter and the giver's ID checks need to be done by now. A deposit stuck in a notice-period savings account has delayed more exchanges than any legal complication.
3. You have the cash for what comes after
Stamp duty, the balance of legal fees, and moving costs all land at or immediately after completion. Confirm your completion statement covers everything and matches what you have. Our stamp duty guide has the current bands if you want to sanity-check the biggest line.
The legal items
4. Searches are back — and read
The standard set: local authority (planning history, road schemes, enforcement notices), drainage and water (is it connected to mains, are there public sewers under the garden that would block an extension), and environmental (flood risk, contamination, mining where relevant). The point is not that the searches were ordered; it is that someone read the results and you understand anything unusual in them.
5. Your solicitor's enquiries are answered — all of them
Your conveyancer raises written enquiries with the seller's side: about the searches, the title, the property information forms. Exchange should wait until every enquiry has a satisfactory answer. Pressure to exchange “with a couple of enquiries outstanding” is pressure to accept unquantified risk — the enquiries still open are usually open because the answers are awkward.
6. Title is clean, or the exceptions are understood
Restrictive covenants (no extensions, no business use, no caravans), rights of way across the property, unregistered land issues. Most title quirks are harmless; the ones that are not — a covenant blocking exactly the extension you are buying the house to build — need to be known before you are committed.
7. For leaseholds: the management pack has arrived and been read
The management pack (LPE1) from the freeholder or managing agent covers service charge accounts, planned major works, the reserve fund, and disputes. The single most expensive surprise in flat purchases is a major works bill — cladding remediation, roof renewal, lift replacement — landing months after completion, when it was sitting in the management pack all along. Confirm lease length, ground rent terms, and service charge history too; our leasehold guide covers what good and bad look like.
The property items
8. Survey issues are resolved, priced, or consciously accepted
Every condition rating 3 and every recommended further investigation from your survey should be in one of three states: investigated and fine, priced and negotiated, or accepted with eyes open. “We will sort it after we move in” is fine as a decision — as a default, it is how £15,000 of roof turns up in year one. See how to use a survey properly.
9. The fixtures and fittings form matches your expectations
The TA10 form records what stays and what goes: appliances, curtains, light fittings, the shed, the greenhouse. Read it against what you remember from viewings. If the seller's “integrated appliances included” became “excluded” somewhere between listing and contract, now is when it is fixable — item by item, in writing.
10. Buildings insurance is arranged to start on exchange
For freehold purchases, risk typically passes to the buyer at exchange — if the house burns down between exchange and completion, you still have to complete. Your buildings insurance therefore starts on the day of exchange, not the day you move in. Have the policy ready to activate; your lender will require it anyway. (For leasehold flats, the building is normally insured by the freeholder — confirm this via the management pack instead.)
The practical items
11. The completion date is agreed — by everyone, including you
The completion date is written into the contract at exchange and is then immovable without both sides' agreement. Check it against your real life: notice on your tenancy, removals availability, work commitments, school dates. In a chain, the date is negotiated along the whole chain — make sure the date being circulated is one you can actually do, and think twice about Fridays: they are the most popular day and the worst one for anything to go wrong, because failures roll to Monday.
12. Everyone in the chain is actually ready
Exchange in a chain is synchronised — every purchase exchanges the same day, or nobody does. Before your exchange day, your solicitor should confirm the whole chain is ready: everyone's funding in place, everyone's enquiries answered. A “ready” that means “ready except the flat at the bottom is still waiting on its management pack” is not ready, and knowing that early keeps your removals deposit refundable.
The rule that makes the list work
Nothing on this list is exotic — every item is routine conveyancing. What goes wrong is sequencing: buyers who feel the finish line approaching start treating open items as formalities, and exchange with a lapsing mortgage offer or an unread management pack because everyone on the phone sounded confident. The discipline is simple: every item above is either confirmed, or it is a reason not to exchange yet. A week's delay before exchange costs almost nothing. Problems discovered after exchange are measured in five figures.