CEO of leading UK firm identifies pain points while offering solutions
The vast majority of borrowers want certainty and an element of control when buying a home, which they are invariably denied due to “incredibly slow” conveyancing transactions, Nick Chadbourne (pictured), CEO of one the UK’s leading providers of conveyancing services, has said.
The head of LMS spoke at length to Mortgage Introducer about the most common problems affecting conveyancers.
It normally takes between eight and 12 weeks to carry out a conveyancing transaction, but, due to increased regulation, such as environment and local authority searches, the process often takes almost twice as long.
Delays can also be caused by the number of stakeholders involved, which can extend the process even further, much to a buyer’s frustration.
To add to the problem is a crisis in the conveyancing sector, which has seen more than 1,000 active conveyancing firms in England and Wales disappear since 2011, according to figures from legal property data and technology provider, Search Acumen.
Chadbourne, who joined LMS as COO in 2016 prior to becoming CEO, offered several plausible solutions that could help streamline the transaction.
He said: “As a buyer, what do I need to do between now and then to make sure that (the moving) date is it? What’s within my control and what’s not within my control? That, for me, is the real crux of it. I think the vast majority of borrowers really want certainty and an element of control.”
To explain the complex nature of the operation - and why delays were often inevitable - Chadbourne compared conveyancing to a finely tuned car production line.
He said: “If you look at a car manufacturer from one end to the other, they utilise better drills, better technology and better methods to do it, but actually waiting for the bits to come along the conveyor belt is the bit that elongates it for a variety of different reasons.
“I don’t think there’s one individual item you can say ‘it’s the conveyancer’s fault’, or ‘the bank’s fault’. It’s a myriad of individual things, but a chain is only as fast as its slowest component part - and that’s the real challenge. If a local authority search is going to take 20 weeks and you’ve got a chain that’s waiting for that part of the process to go through, that’s how long that it will take.”
He nonetheless acknowledged that the transaction was often “incredibly slow” and took “way too long”.
A way forward would be to provide a roadmap which would inform the buyer which steps they needed to take in order to guarantee moving on a set date.
“Some of these factors will be beyond your control, but there are steps you can take as a buyer or seller to speed the process up,” he said.
“Sellers should do more in providing upfront information at the point of listing a property. Speaking from a conveyancer’s mindset, their responsibility is to check that the buyer’s buying what they think they’re buying.
“You could standardise the data that is needed at the front end, or ideally legislate what’s going to happen at the front end and what needs to be provided. If there’s a standard set of information, then it would make it a lot easier, and certainly I would have confidence as a buyer to be able to know what I’m walking into.”
Read more: A revolution in conveyancing?
He suggested storing “certain amounts of data” at the land registry, which would add transparency and “de-risk” the transaction for the buyer.
“It’s ultimately the borrowers that we need to worry about,” he explained. “They’re not necessarily always clued up on what they should be looking out for, so they have to rely on third parties.”
The adoption of technology was moving forward and helping mortgage conveyancing transactions, but it was not a solution on its own.
“The solution will be collaboration and or legislation, and those two things will certainly help (because) the lack of centralised data and the sharing of that data is a real challenge,” he said.
“There are things that take way too long that can be supported by technology. But certainly, it takes the whole industry and all the people involved to be able to collaborate to be able to actually move on significantly.”
In his view, LMS had a unique vantage point as the firm utilises its own technology and data while working with up to 15 other companies across the UK to streamline the operation.
“The second part for us is we focus quite a lot on the brokers, because they can be sometimes forgotten by other lenders or conveyancers in that direct relationship, so we make sure that the brokers know what’s happening at all times to keep the borrower updated,” he said.
