Hi, it is so frustrating when this happens. We got caught in the backlog back in November when the rates first started to really fall and it took almost 5 weeks for our loan to be approved. In this time we'd put an offer in on a house which was accepted and paid the deposit because it had only ever taken a week for approval in the past. The contract gave us 14 days to get finance & a pest and building inspection, but we wouldn't get the inspections done until we knew the loan was going to go through as they are not cheap to have done and we didn't want to waste money. The real estate agent said because we hadn't met the conditions of the contract the owner could pull out of the deal or they could choose to give us an extention. Luckily for us the owners hadn't had any other offers on the house so they decided to stick with us and allow the extension. We were able to settle the loan as soon as the finance came through instead of waiting the extra 4 weeks as the owners had already started to move out. Settlement was still an extra 3 weeks over what we had initally negotiated in the original contract. I found the whole process really frustrating

We didn't use a solicitor but did use an independant conveyancer to do the land titles, rates etc because we wanted to save money on the solicitor fees. Once we had a copy of the contract we'd signed we faxed it to the conveyancer so they could start working out all the paperwork side of things like contacting the council and notifying them that the property had been sold etc. It really depends on how confident you are with reading contracts and understanding them as to whether you need a solicitor, they do charge extra than conveyancers and you need to find one that specialises in property.