Buying or selling a property is a stressful process. Finding the right conveyancing solicitors can save you a lot of time, hassle and in some cases, avoid you losing your property sale. Conveyancing solicitors ensure that the property you are looking to purchase has a safe and marketable title but more importantly, you will not encounter any problems when it comes to you selling the property in the future.
As with most things, both the High Street and the Internet are full of very many firms offering conveyancing solicitors and services, but the cost and level of service you receive vary from firm to firm. However, a higher fee does not necessarily guarantee a personal and fast conveyancing service you require in today’s property market.
Who are conveyancing solicitors?
Conveyancing is the legal process of transferring the ownership of a property. A conveyancing solicitor will handle and take care of all the legal paperwork for you and ensure that your property sale or purchase, be it a residential or commercial property, completes smoothly. They will handle the contracts, give legal advice, carry out local council searches, deal with land registry, and transfer the funds to pay for your property.
Conveyancing Solicitors can be broadly split into two categories –
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Your usual High Street Solicitors, who offer Conveyancing as part of their service
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Specialist Property Lawyers in the form of Licensed Conveyancer’s, who only carry out and look after property legal activities
The major difference between the two different types of firms, mainly drill down to the fact that they are regulated by two separate governing bodies; namely the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) for Solicitors and Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC) for specialist property or conveyancing firms. Naturally, however, the fees charged by Solicitors tend to be higher than what specialist property lawyers do.
How to find the best conveyancing solicitor
Historically, the biggest fear most potential property buyers and sellers have when it comes to the conveyancing stage of the property transaction is speed. Since there are a number of third parties, including Local Councils, Mortgage Lenders, and third-party solicitors, there is no definitive way of ensuring that all these parties would hasten to proceed.
Though you would most likely be put in touch with a local firm of conveyancing solicitors by your estate agent, these firms in most cases tend to use traditional practices such as all correspondence being sent out by post and not accepting email or FAX transmissions as means of service. What this inevitably means is that the whole conveyancing process prolongs even further, unnecessarily.
Notwithstanding the above, communication is key. Being an already stressful period of one’s life, not being updated of key milestones on their property transaction only leads to more anxiety. Though it may sound obvious that your conveyancing solicitors should and must be keeping you informed of your transaction regularly, remarkably a majority of conveyancing firms charge extra for the privilege. Fees start from around ten pounds per telephone call or letter they generate which will inevitably add hundreds of pounds to any original quotations you have by supplied, at the onset of the transaction.
How our Conveyancing Solicitors can help?
Express Conveyancing is not your traditional law firm. In fact, we are the equivalent of an extended arm of Client Services arm for a number of Legal 500 and Top Law Firms in England and Wales. We offer a unique service both to the general public and the law firms we closely work with by ensuring we offer competitive, fixed fee conveyancing services with the added, co completion no fee guarantee. Our conveyancing quotes incorporate all fees, which you will be required to pay for any standard freehold or leasehold transaction to avoid those nasty surprises. We also assess your individual cases with their own merits and place them with the most competent and suitable firm of lawyers, from our panel of solicitors.
Contact our team of property experts today, to obtain a conveyancing quote, or for more details of how we can help.
Why use an Express Conveyancing Solicitor?
Though technically Conveyancing formalities can be concluded by anybody i.e. you do not have to be legally qualified, with today’s strict compliance and lender requirements; it is a mandatory requirement to instruct a Conveyancing Solicitor to represent you on your property purchase, sale, or re-mortgage.
With Express Conveyancing’s Panel of specialist property solicitors, we offer access to over a hundred property professionals, all whom have been handpicked on their expertise as opposed to cost alone.
Instructing us also gives the following added benefits
- Fixed Fees which comes with a no completion, no fee guarantee
- Fully transparent on our fees – we might appear more expensive than our competitors, but we really aren’t
- Access to our market leading Case Tracker giving all parties involved with the transaction, 24/7 access – drastically reducing the time frames from a 12-week industry average to 4 weeks*
- Remarkably, our solicitors have far less abortive rates than most other firms – less than 10% while the industry average is 30%
The Conveyancing Process Explained
The Conveyancing process can be widely split into three key milestones;
- Pre-Exchange
- Pre-Completion
- Post Completion
The Pre-Exchange stage of the transaction covers around 80% of all formalities. This is the part of the process where your offer has been accepted, you choose and instruct a Conveyancing Solicitor to act on your behalf who will intern carry out various title and locality checks. This is also the part of the transaction where your mortgage formalities take place (if you are not a cash buyer of course). Once your conveyancing solicitor has obtained satisfactory responses to any queries with your seller’s solicitors, they will then arrange for contracts to be exchanged. Until Contracts have exchanged, there is no guarantee that the seller (if you are a buyer) or vice versa will be selling or buying the subject property. 99% of all transactions that abort or fail to successfully complete happen during this part of the transaction.
Pre-Completion is generally considered a slightly less stressful part of the transaction. Both your seller and you will now know for sure when you will be moving home. You are now free to organise removals and confirm deliveries. Your conveyancing solicitor will also by now have requested your mortgage advance from your lender in readiness. This is also the time if you are a first time buyer and have Help to Buy ISA accounts to now close them and request any bonus funds.
You can read more about various Help to Buy options that are available to you by clicking here –
Post-Completions are strictly for your Conveyancing Solicitor to carry out. They will now prepare and apply to the Land Registry in the form of an AP1. This will ensure the property is now registered in your name. Depending on how busy or quiet the Land Registry is, the whole registration process can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months – however this should not make any difference to you on how you can enjoy your new property. If anybody requires you to supply any evidence of your proof of ownership of the property, then your Conveyancing Solicitor will be able to provide a letter confirming that.
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