We have the house keys

What a week! The plan during this whole house buying deal has been to complete (or as they say here, settle) the sale on August 15th, which is today. But it did not go smoothly!

The players:
NZPost - the national postage service
Nationwide - our bank in the UK, who were holding the money we needed to pay 10% of the house price.
ANZ - the bank in New Zealand who are giving us a mortgage for 90% of the house price.
BNZ - the bank in New Zealand where we have our current account
Lucky (yes, really) - our mortgage broker

NZPost
About two weeks ago, we posted an express courier letter (delivery within 1 to 5 days) to the UK to ask for our money to be transferred to New Zealand. NZPost took the best part of a week to get it out of the country.

Nationwide
Nationwide received our transfer request on August 4th (I think). We were so relieved that the request had finally got there, as it was in plenty of time to pay the 10% deposit before the settlement date. So we waited, and we waited. And waited. I sent them messages on their website, which were ignored (and incidentally have still not been answered, although they are meant to be responded to within 5 days).

On August 8th, I phoned them and was told that actually our form had not been filled in correctly. Bad on our part, but why had they not got in touch with us? They are aware that we're in New Zealand, and they have phone and email details for us. Anyway, I supplied the missing information, and was told that we were good to go.

On August 12th, Skry phoned them to find out what was going on. After multiple attempts, and being repeatedly directed to an automated queue which promptly hung up on him, he finally got through to a person at 1.15am. She couldn't help, but said she would call back.

At about 2am, she called back to say that our HSBC account had insufficient funds to transfer anything to the Nationwide account. Er, what? We don't have a HSBC account, and we're transferring out of the Nationwide, not into it.

I fell asleep at that point, but Skry was still being called at 5am or so. The end result was that the Nationwide admitted they'd actually lost all our information, and we'd have to start the whole transfer process again. At least they would accept fax instructions rather than posted instructions, this time around.

On August 13th, after a very angry fax from us, Nationwide finally triggered the transfer to New Zealand.

ANZ
Lucky arranged a mortgage for us through ANZ. Due to the problems we had with Nationwide, ANZ also agreed to give us an overdraft until our money arrived from the UK.

On August 13th, we opened our account with ANZ and were assured that everything was fine, we could pay off the overdraft as soon as our money arrived, and nothing would stop the settlement on the 15th.

At noon on August 14th, Lucky contacted me in a panic to say that ANZ had reneged on the deal. They would give us an overdraft, but it would need to be paid back on the 15th. What use is that?! The rest of the afternoon was filled with phone calls between me, Lucky, and a manager from ANZ. It seems that the local ANZ had been quite happy to lend us the money until next week, and had agreed to do so, and a manager further up the chain had stepped in and stopped it. Despite everybody's best efforts, they would not change their stance.

BNZ
At 1.05am on August 15th, I got an automated text message from BNZ. The money from the Nationwide account had arrived. Phew! Talk about leaving it until the last minute. After visiting our solicitor, and signing all the necessary papers, I took myself down to BNZ and transferred the money to the solicitor's account. BNZ is the only bank that hasn't messed us around - that part went perfectly smoothly! - and a couple of hours later I got the call. The house keys were waiting for us to collect!

Current Situation
Skry and I nipped round to the house this afternoon, and found the previous owner still packing up the last of his stuff. It was nice to meet him and reassure him that his house would be well looked after. It's too much for him now, but it was his home for years and he's sad to leave it. We're going to tackle the decoration work tomorrow, wallpaper stripping and painting and general upgrading. But for now I'm just happy that we're in :-)