Buying, selling and renting a property in this country is a nightmare. The legal and regulatory foundations of the system are messy and various ‘service’ providers extract as much money as they can out of the participants along the way. Most of the lawyers who are part of the system are no different, but the problems are much deeper than dodgy conveyancers.
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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I'm in the process of buying a flat at the moment and the solicitors are taking their time, I can't tell if that is just how it is or if it's their fault to be honest. The updates we get from them sounds like they are following up enquiries from the seller's solicitors but who knows. We were hoping to complete soon but looks like it might be another month or two before that happens.
I think for some solicitors, conveyancer is low priority as there isn't much money involved and there is no pressure to get it done quickly, which is why it can drag on.
The updates we get from them sounds like they are following up enquiries from the seller’s solicitors but who knows
We've just recently bought a house and were on pretty good terms with the people we bought from so we got more updates direct from them than from our solicitors. Literally any time our solicitor said they were chasing or following something up from the other end, their solicitor would be saying "no, no, we sent that across weeks ago" and vice versa. I'm pretty sure it's just standard practice to always blame the other side and they're all in on it, because there's no way for anyone to prove the hearsay.
Odds are the whole thing could be done and dusted inside a week but they stretch it out as long as possible so that they can charge a fortune.
A lot of firms seem to treat conveyancing like hoovering the living room before your mum comes to visit: It should be a quick job, so it's done at the last minute.
This all goes sideways if there is an unexpected complication, when they finally get to it 5 months and 14 days after the mortgage offer comes through.
Apparently there were price wars for the business in the 90s, so lots of companies treat it like fill-in work for when more lucrative tasks don't need to be done.
I remember doing my will and concluding that it was money for old rope (and likely one of the first bits of business AI will take from them) but I got a different solicitor for buying a house and she was great.
It was a complete nightmare of a process that I am still recovering from - had 4 offers accepted and had to walk away from the first 3 because they all needed extensive building work. However, she was on point all the way through and didn't even starting the searches on property number 3 as so many houses in the vicinity needed work (and boy did that one!). So she saved me a few quid when I suspect most lawyers would have just pulled the trigger in them for a cheap pay day
I've only been through the buying process once, but my Solicitor was so bad.
We were constantly chasing them, giving them reminders. Found out they never registered us with the Help To Buy company so we had to so that when we remortgaged.
We went into the process thinking they were someone to help us through it, but have since learned thats not really the case.
It felt like because they were required for the process, they could justtakke the piss to be honest and it was easy money for them.
Same with the remortgage, where Barclay's forced us to use Optima Legal. Worst company I've ever had to deal with. Not a single good or productive interaction.
They cost me thousands of pounds in extra mortgage repayments as we were on variable rate whilst between our deals, because they took 9 months to process our remortgage.
I had one of their operators laugh at me on the phone because I was getting so worked up worrying I was going to lose my flag because I couldn't afford the variable rate forever.
I wouldn't say my conveyancer was bad but I had to chase him to check he was chasing down whatever was needed at that stage as everything took so long: I waited a few months for the pack from the seller but that was mainly as his solicitors were useless, my local council was slow returning searches, etc. Right at the end when I was getting close to completion, he went off sick and a colleague had to take over. She was more stressed than I was I think, but managed to get it over the line (just as well, wouldn't have fancied reapplying for a mortgage now!).
So whilst my experience wasn't terrible, whoever you go with have no qualms about checking in weekly (if not more!). It might not be that your solicitor is bad, but other parties they're relying on are slow!
It might not be that your solicitor is bad, but other parties they’re relying on are slow!
That's part of the problem. I had a nightmare selling a family home and it came down to the water board saying they didn't have the property on their books despite supplying water there for decades. Turns out they never had the number on their records and I had a nervous time when I basically had 30 minutes to do a 15 minute drive and find the relevant documents or a relative's sale could have fallen through. So one of the simplest steps could have torpedoed the whole thing.
That sale wasn't helped by the solicitor (a specialist in property law) not registering the house with the Land Registry decades earlier, despite this being discover a dozen years ago and him being instructed to sort it out, which he never did. Coincidentally, he was acting for the people buying the house and was issuing letters hassling us because this hadn't already been done. I was able to find paperwork demonstrating that it was all his fault and it all got sorted.
Our conveyancer was amazing, there were various issues particularly on the day of exchange & completion (including our mortgage company sending the wrong amount of money). Our conveyancer logged on from home on his day off and worked all day to get us over the line (exchanged and completed simultaneously at 5pm).
Wow, that's what I wish I had. Our exchange had been delayed by over a week and I have to chase them up every single day for a status update.
We got our intern to do a photocopy after 6 months of you calling annnnd that will be £600 admin fee please
You get what you pay for with solicitors. The no completion, no fee ones are the bottom rung, and from then on it improves.
Where I work I have a fair amount of contact with homeowners, and some looking to buy/sell.
More often than not, the solicitor is chasing documentation in the last week before handover and they get really shitty about it. Despite having a very long time to have sorted the paperwork as its historical information they're getting from me that will have been available for the whole process.
Seems a case of "they can get away with it, so they will". Cos every time it cocks up, the solicitor doesn't seem to get the blame.