Adam Back wrote: > Largest thing I bought cash was 2,000 GBP for a 2nd hand car some > years ago. I did toy with trying to buy a house with paper cash to > see if it could be done, but I didn't bother in the end -- but I think > that all that would have happened is the seller's lawyer would go to > the bank and pay it in to make sure it's good.
Actually, the way house buying works (generally) in the UK is that you deposit your money with _your_ solicitor, who promises the seller's solicitor that they have it, contracts are exchanged (typically by fax!) and then they settle at their convenience. Scarily insecure, technically. In fact, many years ago I had a solicitor who trusted me to such an extent that he financed a house purchase from his firm's client slush fund (i.e. he promised that he had the money even though he hadn't, and was prepared to back it from that fund). That's the kind of personal touch bits on the wire will never replace :-) Oh, incidentally, this whole process is going to become bits on the wire very shortly, I believe - one of the first high-value transactions to become so in the UK. The UK Land Registry has been all electronic for a long time, too, I'm told. But because it works we don't hear about it much. Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/ "There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff
