We live in the 21st century.
For almost 100 years we have enjoyed instantaneous communication with others throughout the world, thanks to Alexander Graham Bell. We now enjoy a further variety of means of instant communication in faxes and e-mail. But we have one fundamental flaw – we cannot speak on the phone to more than one person at a time. I shall ignore the facility of conferencing, which no one I know understands or uses. The problem, therefore, is that despite all the benefits of technology we still play telephone tag.
Frustration
Telephone tag is a quaint but incredibly frustrating game where you phone someone you need to speak to and they are not in. You leave a voice-mail and get on with something else. In the meantime, your intended recipient has phoned back and left you a message. You phone back and they are engaged in a meeting – they phone back, and so the game continues. In the meantime, your client has rung to say that everyone has been trying to speak to you and asks why you haven’t contacted the other side.
This is all part and parcel of what conveyancers call exchanging contracts.
But what exactly is exchanging contracts and why – apart from not being able to get hold of the other side – does it seem to take so long?
Bring on the fun
When acting for a buyer, a solicitor needs to have checked title, raised enquiries, received the local search and the mortgage and then the fun begins. Someone needs to start a discussion about a completion date. Without this, contracts cannot be exchanged and in order to get to that date all the parties need to be agreed.
This involves everyone in the chain getting ready to exchange and then agreeing a date. That is harder than it sounds. Everyone likes a Friday for completion – two days off work to move in – and because everyone likes a Friday, it generally means that removal firms don’t. Sometimes they want a deposit, sometimes they are too busy, but all most people can do is give them a provisional date of completion. That must be highly unsatisfactory for removers who need to manage their resources, but anyway that is one hurdle to get over. The second hurdle is all the parties’ personal considerations. Some may be on holiday, some may be in rented accommodation and some may just be pig-headed about wanting to move on a particular day. All in all, it is a wonder that any date at all is agreed.
However, these dates invariably do get agreed and then it is up to the lawyers to make sure that it happens on the day in question.
Why do we need any time between exchange and completion?
There used to be an almost unbreakable convention that there were four weeks between exchange and completion. That was the case for decades and it was very sensible. It meant everyone knew in advance the date they were moving and there was plenty of time to pack, tie up loose ends and say goodbye to the old house. Nowadays a four-week completion date is almost unheard of. Generally there is maybe a two-week interval and often even less. Indeed, quite often we have what we call a simultaneous exchange and completion, where there is no interval at all. In theory that may sound attractive but in practice it is a disaster waiting to happen. On the day of intended completion there could be a number of people in a chain all packed up in their removal vans, on the motorway without any contracts having been exchanged. If anything goes wrong there are plenty of tears, and that’s just the solicitors.
There is a real problem of expectations to deal with, which is one of the most difficult that conveyancers have to manage. Clients don’t understand the conveyancing process, therefore they depend on what their conveyancer says to them. What clients want to know is whether they will be moving house on a particular day. That is not unreasonable and yet is the one thing that their conveyancer cannot guarantee without there having been an exchange of contracts. We tell all our clients that simultaneous exchange and completions are not good for anyones’ stress levels – including ours – but they rarely listen.
And another thing...
Even if all conveyancers in a chain have done their jobs as best they can there are hurdles all along the way.
One of the most recurrent nightmares a conveyancer has is that the phone rings at 5.15pm on a Friday just when you are logging off your computer and getting ready for that drink before picking up the takeaway on the way home. It is a distressed client ringing from the seller’s estate agents who won’t release the keys to them because the seller’s solicitor hasn’t received the purchase price.
There could be a number of reasons for this and not always because the conveyancers haven’t pulled their fingers out. Our beloved lenders don’t always cover themselves with glory. Sometimes they make a mistake and don’t release funds. Sometimes they find they haven’t got an important piece of documentation. Sometimes the conveyancer can’t find out if the money has been released because they can’t get through on the phones. But it is quite often our antiquated banking system that lets us down in that money takes longer than it should to be deposited in a conveyancer’s bank account.
All in all, and despite the efficiency of most conveyancers, there is invariably one completion that goes to the wire. 99 per cent actually complete on the day with the goodwill of lenders and all other parties, but that Friday night drink sure tastes good.
