Solicitors - Are they all slow?!
Discussion
So many times I've seen the title to the property being sold and it's not exactly the same as the area assumed by the search provider. So there's a jolly good reason to wait for the contract, which will come with title and plan, before ordering searches. You're already going to have more complaints if the client has to pay for two sets of searches because the first ones were done against just part of the property - or a completely different property.
In my experience the biggest delay is sellers not being aware of their own property, nor ready to sell. They think because they're paying £500 to their solicitor that they don't have to do anything. The solicitor doesn't have ESP; ask them up front for the forms, fill them in and get hold of your title deeds from whoever is holding them - the Land Registry title may be electronic now but things like building regs consents, title policies, FENSA certs etc aren't held by the Land Registry.
In my experience the biggest delay is sellers not being aware of their own property, nor ready to sell. They think because they're paying £500 to their solicitor that they don't have to do anything. The solicitor doesn't have ESP; ask them up front for the forms, fill them in and get hold of your title deeds from whoever is holding them - the Land Registry title may be electronic now but things like building regs consents, title policies, FENSA certs etc aren't held by the Land Registry.
Edited by Jobbo on Thursday 11th May 18:23
Emmapuma said:
Our solicitor was pretty quick, but the seller's was slow. We were told we may complete in as little as a month due to us being 1st time buyers and there not being a chain on either side, but it was still closer to 3 months by the time we moved in!
Ours was the same. We were ready to exchange and complete very quickly. The sellers solicitors have been nothing short of s
t. We exchanged last week and complete on the 19th. Jobbo said:
So many times I've seen the title to the property being sold and it's not exactly the same as the area assumed by the search provider. So there's a jolly good reason to wait for the contract, which will come with title and plan, before ordering searches. You're already going to have more complaints if the client has to pay for two sets of searches because the first ones were done against just part of the property - or a completely different property.
In my experience the biggest delay is sellers not being aware of their own property, nor ready to sell. They think because they're paying £500 to their solicitor that they don't have to do anything. The solicitor doesn't have ESP; ask them up front for the forms, fill them in and get hold of your title deeds from whoever is holding them - the Land Registry title may be electronic now but things like building regs consents, title policies, FENSA certs etc aren't held by the Land Registry.
Out of curiosity what's the big deal about a fensa certificate anyway? I just don't get the significance at all. The existence or absence of certification can be found instantly online if these things are of interest.In my experience the biggest delay is sellers not being aware of their own property, nor ready to sell. They think because they're paying £500 to their solicitor that they don't have to do anything. The solicitor doesn't have ESP; ask them up front for the forms, fill them in and get hold of your title deeds from whoever is holding them - the Land Registry title may be electronic now but things like building regs consents, title policies, FENSA certs etc aren't held by the Land Registry.
Edited by Jobbo on Thursday 11th May 18:23
Agree with most of your post by the way. Clients typically have little understanding as to what is involved or required when selling their home and usually build in their own delays as a result. Everywhere you look within the process you can see potential for delays!
FENSA cert is a tick box (it's a self-cert building regs certificate for new windows, so the CML handbook requirements on building regs are the ones to look at) - and ticking boxes is what conveyancers have to do for mortgage lenders. Even if a buyer is acquiring without a mortgage, they'll need to consider saleability to someone buying off them in future with a mortgage. In most cases you can probably get title insurance to cover a missing FENSA or building regs cert; the worry for me is that insurance is a sticking plaster; you'll be better off in 99.9% of cases sorting out the actual problem. If the seller installed new windows cheaply and didn't get a FENSA cert, how bad might the work have been? Not enough people haggle over this sort of thing.
I'm not a conveyancer, by the way, but I do keep my hand in. No idea how anyone makes any money out of it. Delaying things isn't going to make it easier to make money from.
ETA: I missed your point about a FENSA cert being available online. Probably quite a lot of non-title docs like that are now available online, but how much more do you want to pay your solicitor to do the work of finding them all when you, as homeowner, should have the info to hand?
I'm not a conveyancer, by the way, but I do keep my hand in. No idea how anyone makes any money out of it. Delaying things isn't going to make it easier to make money from.
ETA: I missed your point about a FENSA cert being available online. Probably quite a lot of non-title docs like that are now available online, but how much more do you want to pay your solicitor to do the work of finding them all when you, as homeowner, should have the info to hand?
I'm potentially banging on now so forgive me. Fensa, so what? Most windows in this country are old. Who cares if they had a fensa certificate issued a decade or two decades ago? So what if the supplier wasn't fensa registered? Shed loads of non fensa suppliers are ahead of fensa registered suppliers on quality in any case. What does it even matter anyway? If you want to get a handle on the quality of all the windows in a house - and there may be dozens of them, of varying ages and styles, that may or may not have partial or complete fensa certification (when new) - inspect them, open them.
Shakes head...
Shakes head...
Jobbo said:
So many times I've seen the title to the property being sold and it's not exactly the same as the area assumed by the search provider. So there's a jolly good reason to wait for the contract, which will come with title and plan, before ordering searches. You're already going to have more complaints if the client has to pay for two sets of searches because the first ones were done against just part of the property - or a completely different property.
In my experience the biggest delay is sellers not being aware of their own property, nor ready to sell. They think because they're paying £500 to their solicitor that they don't have to do anything. The solicitor doesn't have ESP; ask them up front for the forms, fill them in and get hold of your title deeds from whoever is holding them - the Land Registry title may be electronic now but things like building regs consents, title policies, FENSA certs etc aren't held by the Land Registry.
Title from land registry costs £4. Why not get the plan from land reg snd do searches based on that?In my experience the biggest delay is sellers not being aware of their own property, nor ready to sell. They think because they're paying £500 to their solicitor that they don't have to do anything. The solicitor doesn't have ESP; ask them up front for the forms, fill them in and get hold of your title deeds from whoever is holding them - the Land Registry title may be electronic now but things like building regs consents, title policies, FENSA certs etc aren't held by the Land Registry.
Edited by Jobbo on Thursday 11th May 18:23
Normal property conveyancing isnt thst hard. Generally i see no reason why it is so often slow.
scenario8 said:
I'm potentially banging on now so forgive me. Fensa, so what? Most windows in this country are old. Who cares if they had a fensa certificate issued a decade or two decades ago? So what if the supplier wasn't fensa registered? Shed loads of non fensa suppliers are ahead of fensa registered suppliers on quality in any case. What does it even matter anyway? If you want to get a handle on the quality of all the windows in a house - and there may be dozens of them, of varying ages and styles, that may or may not have partial or complete fensa certification (when new) - inspect them, open them.
Shakes head...
FENSA certification didn't exist until 2002 so two decades ago, there would have been no certificate. If you think any people selling houses with recent replacement windows but no FENSA cert considered in depth the quality and went with a higher quality, not certified window then you're not living in the real world.Shakes head...
But I gave the solution to the problem anyway, and it's just an example of the sort of documentation which the homeowner could and should provide; it's one of many things which the solicitor will need to tick boxes but can't guess at.
blueg33 said:
Title from land registry costs £4. Why not get the plan from land reg snd do searches based on that?
Normal property conveyancing isnt thst hard. Generally i see no reason why it is so often slow.
Because what you're buying might not be one registered title. I always do a mapsearch before I get the title from the seller; it's amazing how many times the property being sold includes a separate title added later, or a little bit of another title, or isn't the whole title. It's for the seller's solicitor to disclose title to the buyer, not for the buyer's solicitor to guess what is included from an address.Normal property conveyancing isnt thst hard. Generally i see no reason why it is so often slow.
£3 for the title, £3 extra for the plan, BTW.
ETA: IIRC you work for a reasonable sized housebuilder. Every single time your solicitors send details through to a buyer's solicitor, they're selling part of a title. Surely you wouldn't expect any buyer to order searches until the receive the proper plan?
Edited by Jobbo on Thursday 11th May 21:50
Jobbo said:
blueg33 said:
Title from land registry costs £4. Why not get the plan from land reg snd do searches based on that?
Normal property conveyancing isnt thst hard. Generally i see no reason why it is so often slow.
Because what you're buying might not be one registered title. I always do a mapsearch before I get the title from the seller; it's amazing how many times the property being sold includes a separate title added later, or a little bit of another title, or isn't the whole title. It's for the seller's solicitor to disclose title to the buyer, not for the buyer's solicitor to guess what is included from an address.Normal property conveyancing isnt thst hard. Generally i see no reason why it is so often slow.
£3 for the title, £3 extra for the plan, BTW.
ETA: IIRC you work for a reasonable sized housebuilder. Every single time your solicitors send details through to a buyer's solicitor, they're selling part of a title. Surely you wouldn't expect any buyer to order searches until the receive the proper plan?
Edited by Jobbo on Thursday 11th May 21:50
Yes there may be several titles making up one property, but if time is important its no hardship to obtain the main titles and do the searches based on those. Clearly title enquiries need to be answered by the seller, but local authority searches, utilities etc can in all but a few cases be done off the back of the plans from the Land Registry.
When we sell our developments (mainly to institutional investors) we have done all the searches, they get a full dd pack straight away (described yesterday by one investor as "the gold standard").
when we are buying the land, I expect my land team to have registered titles on their desks within minutes of knowing that a site may be suitable. If we are making an offer, we kick off the searches. These things are not big costs.
I guess my point is that any buyer or seller should be guided by their solicitor as to what can and cant be done to make things quicker than they typically are. There is no reason why searches can't be started early in most cases, there is no need to sit and wait for the seller to do some things that can just as easily be done by the buyer.
The problem is that people are always looking for cut price conveyancing and end up employing a "sausage machine" firm who have to do thousands of transactions with as little resource as possible to make a living. Inevitably, these companies are not able to provide individual advice and struggle to see beyond the "usual" process.
Edited by blueg33 on Friday 12th May 08:45
Jobbo said:
But I gave the solution to the problem anyway, and it's just an example of the sort of documentation which the homeowner could and should provide; it's one of many things which the solicitor will need to tick boxes but can't guess at.
When one of my daughters bought a couple of years ago her solicitor wasn't bothered about certificates at all - he said they're not worth the paper they're written on.One they did get was for the electrics - then it turned out the kitchen was reverse polarity.
1) Pay for searches now, you can find the title number easily enough and let your solicitor get a head start,
2) Chase the estate agent, he should be speaking to both solicitors at least once per week...its his job
3) The reason to use "proper" estate agents is because they will chase the sale through as the sooner it completes the sooner a fee
4) make sure the vendor is not using a .com "easy conveyancing service.....suggest you will withdraw your offer unless they use a proper lawyer.
The danger of cheap conveyancing is all work done by what are essentially call centre staff, they are given boxes to tick and cannot take a view on things; whereas if there is a conversation solicitor to solicitor then they can work out any minor dramas as they both have the power to make a decision
Good Luck
2) Chase the estate agent, he should be speaking to both solicitors at least once per week...its his job
3) The reason to use "proper" estate agents is because they will chase the sale through as the sooner it completes the sooner a fee
4) make sure the vendor is not using a .com "easy conveyancing service.....suggest you will withdraw your offer unless they use a proper lawyer.
The danger of cheap conveyancing is all work done by what are essentially call centre staff, they are given boxes to tick and cannot take a view on things; whereas if there is a conversation solicitor to solicitor then they can work out any minor dramas as they both have the power to make a decision
Good Luck
Dan_M5 said:
I have news! My solicitor should now have the draft contracts! So she is ordering the searches next week, Daventry have a 15days return time on searches which they say them complete in 10working days! So I'm hoping 1st/2nd week in June will be completion!
Do you need a mortgage? That normally slows things up..........Dan_M5 said:
blueg33 said:
Do you need a mortgage? That normally slows things up..........
Thats already sorted. Valuation was done today and offer will be confirmed next week. So it will just be sitting there waiting for the solicitors to do there thingblueg33 said:
Yes there may be several titles making up one property, but if time is important its no hardship to obtain the main titles and do the searches based on those. Clearly title enquiries need to be answered by the seller, but local authority searches, utilities etc can in all but a few cases be done off the back of the plans from the Land Registry.
I've sold plenty of development sites to big housebuilders. They're invariably one or two large titles. The housebuilder will get an estate layout plan approved by the Land Registry as part of their work preparing the sales packs. But if the solicitor for the buyer tries to locate the property they'll just get the whole estate's title; you can't do searches against that.Still surprised that people are suggesting a buyer's solicitor would do searches (which are based on a plan, not just a property address or Land Registry title number) until they receive from the seller's solicitor evidence of what they need to search against in the form of a plan.
blueg33 said:
Many solicitors are slow, the best usually have the most proactive client.
This. The best also tend to charge a little more.Also there are other factors in play that people might not be aware of.
I have been waiting for the manager at an estate agents to sign off a memorandum of sale since yesterday morning and have been told that it will not be done until tomorrow. this is on a deal where all parties wish to complete 9th June.
Re 'waiting for the contract to lodge searches' it is more important to get a plan for search purposes than the contract and that can usually be e-mailed so call your solicitor and tell them to get the sellers to email them Official Copy Title Plan this pm so that you can verify the accuracy of the delineation of the boundaries over the weekend and instruct searches on Monday.
One other point is that some clients refuse to instruct you to start work until they have had their mortgage offer in or their survey done. This can often cost a chain 3-4 weeks before i can even start work and I can't always make back that time, no matter how fast i try to do so.
Gassing Station | Homes, Gardens and DIY | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff