We are virtually living in the virtual world. As consumers, we routinely go onto the web to buy airline tickets, source holidays and search for our new homes, while as intermediaries, you can constantly check the progress of your customers cases through legal systems designed to keep you in the know.
So why is it then that conveyancing seems to be taking as long as it used to – and with the same level of stress to you and your client?
With Halifax announcing its new legal panel for conveyancing, I thought it timely to get down and dirty and get to the bottom of why conveyancing remains such a slow process and what is happening to speed things up.
As they say, ‘it can only get better’, but I hope when you have finishing reading this and the other articles in this series you may have a better idea of where it is all (still) going wrong.
Frustration
I know that most of you who read this magazine will have at some time or another been frustrated at the seemingly endless process of buying a house, or more likely suffered the abuse of a client who is ‘stuck’ in the process and you happen to be in the firing line when they decided to vent their frustration.
Your natural response is to phone up the solicitors to ‘kick ass’, only to find that you can’t get to the bottom of what is going on, or more likely that you have been fobbed off with some lame excuse about the local search not being back or that they are waiting for the other side to return their call. The fact that this is probably true doesn’t appease you or your client and yet there is nothing you can do, except let the transaction run its natural course and hope the client doesn’t end up blaming you for the misery caused to them. I’m not exaggerating – am I?
So without being an apologist for the legal profession, let me move on straight away to delay number one.
Delay 1 – Getting started
You may think that once the estate agents have agreed a sale of property and notified your clients’ solicitors of the details, that a file will be opened and all the preliminary work searches instigated. Wrong. The buyers’ solicitors won’t normally do anything until they have received a sum of money on account from the client to cover the cost of a local and utilities search (this could be as much as £280). Even then they probably won’t be able to process the search until the sellers’ solicitors have provided them with a plan which the local authority may want.
As far as the sellers’ solicitors are concerned, they won’t be able to produce a plan until they can either receive the deeds from the seller’s lender (normally quite quick, but not always) or they can obtain a copy of the Registered File Plan (assuming the property is registered and assuming they can identify the registered title number of the property). Now, there are ways and means of getting round these problems which specialist conveyancing firms know about, but the majority of conveyancing is still carried out by the cottage industry that is the high street legal profession, who have neither the time nor inclination to be such a niche practice. So right at the start of the transaction there could be a significant delay in the buyer’s solicitors applying for the local search. This delay is nobody’s fault as such – it is just the way it is. Fortunately it doesn’t often prove disastrous but it is the first occasion where a client may feel that things may not go as smoothly as they wish.
Delay 2- The preliminaries
Once it has been submitted, the search can take weeks to come back from the council. The National Land Information System (NLIS) is making a significant difference to this but there is a lot still to be done in terms of councils getting up to speed electronically. When the search does come back, the buyers’ solicitors have to interpret this and quite often there are entries on it relating to planning consents of, or other matters affecting, the property which they will want to raise with the sellers’ solicitors.
Buyers’ solicitors used to be fairly relaxed about matters such as extensions, which, on the face of it, didn’t have planning or building regulation consent, provided the work was carried out more than four years before. This has all changed on the lack of building regulation consent following a recent court case, which ruled that solicitors had to investigate the lack of building regulation consent regardless of when the extension was put up. This does cause delays and extra expense. Again not the fault of the solicitors but one more potential delaying factor in the process.
