How long between 'offer accepted' and 'keys in hand'

Looking for a bit of advice...

We are currently in the process of buying our first house. Once our offer was accepted and our engineer had a look, we gave the auctioneer and our solicitor the go ahead, that we were happy to move forward with the sale - this was nearly 13 weeks ago. We were assured by the vendors solicitor that it would be very straight forward, no questions as to planning or ownership, very organised with the paperwork, etc. - We were told we were looking at about 11 or 12 weeks max.

Since then our solicitor has been told that they are waiting on deed from the bank. This then changed to waiting for a report to be done up. He has been told multiple time that the contracts will be sent over in a few days, but nothing arrives. Our solicitor said we could be looking at another 6-8 weeks if we are lucky.

Is 19/20 weeks a normal time frame for what was supposed to be a very straight forward sale of a vacant house?

Thanks

Its rare that a property would change hands in a 3 month period. It should, but its rare.

Inefficiencies on all sides tend to prolong the process. Banks not locating deeds in time, solicitors waiting to the last minute before requesting certain information, which could have been requested week earlier, valuation reports expiring and needing to be carries out again etc, its a slow process alright.

I have a brother in a well developed country in Asia, who tells me, the conveyancing process there, took one week to complete.

The quickest for me was from an agreed price to keys 5 weeks. Even the solicitor was impressed. I think in that case we were all motivated to see things progress quickly.
I also had it were it took 20 weeks and I could never figure out what the delays were. I was selling that time and physically putting a new for sale sign up in the garden seemed to inspire the buyer to close.

i did it in 6 weeks. But I had a good solicitor and I'm peristant to the point of annoying. So that probably helped.......quicker Im gone, quicker the questions stop!

My sister was waiting about 4 or 5 months also - in her case it was a delay in drawing up contracts on the vendors side because they still had outstanding charges on the house they were selling. That presumably held up deeds and so delayed entire process.

Currently 12 weeks waiting to close from sale agreed, house I'm buying is vacant, things were going smoothly but bank have come back twice with questions around final documents before releasing funds, something that should take a few days is running for two weeks now, very frustrating, seems every time I respond to questions then the application for drawdown just goes to the back of the queue