Completion is the stage in the transaction when the buyer pays over the purchase monies and moves into the property.

There's usually an interval of about a couple of weeks between exchange and completion. This gives the parties time to arrange removals and the buyer's solicitor time to arrange for the mortgage money to be drawn down.

The time between exchange and completion can be longer or shorter. Occasionally, exchange and completion will take place on the same day. That will sometimes happen where the seller's property is vacant so that he/she (the seller) isn't concerned about synchronsing the sale with his/her related purchase. The worry on a simultaneous exchange & completion is that there's no guarantee that the transaction is going to happen until it does. That can be unnerving if there's a chain of several transactions to synchronise, with all the parties in the chain waiting moodily in their removal lorries.

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