Residential Conveyancing

Whether you're buying, selling, renting or leasing, we can help you make your move as smooth as possible. 

We provide a full service including dealing with your chosen lender, completing and submitting all the necessary legal forms, and dealing with the eventual registration - all at a fixed, competitive price. 

Obtain your personalised quote via our online tool in the Services – Conveyancing section of this website.

Pricing

This quote tool will give you the price based on a “normal” transaction, built upon the criteria that you have advised us of.

Additional costs may arise however for a number of reasons during the progress of the matter, and the following situations are some of the more common.

  • You may be required to take out an Indemnity Insurance Policy. These relate to unforeseen matters that may arise in the period after the transaction, or may be related to missing or defective information (ie information that you are either not sure of or cannot substantiate). In such cases we will advise you of this cost once known;
  • We make the assumption that the property you are selling is registered – ie is on the database held by Land Registry. If it is not, the buyer may insist on it being registered before the transaction progresses, and in which case we will advise you of the appropriate additional cost;
  • We make the assumption that the property you are buying is registered – ie is on the database held by Land Registry. If it is not, then we will charge an additional fee in the event that the seller will not be making an application for registration before you purchase it;
  • In cases where there are multiple parties to a transaction, we assume that the sellers / buyers will act in harmony, and that instructions given to us will be uniform and clear. Where multiple Clients are involved, the lack of conformity of instruction may lead to additional cost, or us not being able to progress in a matter.

Timescales

This is an important question that is often raised with us at the outset of a Conveyancing matter, as it is important whether you are buying, selling or both to know how quickly your matter will progress.

There is no one answer to this question, however you can be sure that we will proceed with all haste once we have received completed instructions from you.

To summarise the various steps, we have constructed this (simplified) process to help you to understand how matters should proceed.

  • Once you have received a quote from us, if you wish to proceed you will need to provide us with full details of your purchase and / or sale, including whether it is freehold / leasehold, the price you have agreed with your seller / buyer as well as detailed information about the type of property;
  • We will also need to have 2 forms of identification from you so that we can begin our AML/KYC procedures, together with monies on account in relation to disbursements that we will need to make in the pursuance of your matter. We will at this stage run an electronic identity check on all clients, so if you are purchasing or selling in more than one name, we will need full details of all person(s) who will be our client(s);
  • In most cases, an estate agent will be involved and we will receive from them details of the property involved, which should match the details provided by you. If they do not, we will contact you to understand why. In cases where there are no estate agents involved – ie a private sale, we may need additional information from you concerning the transaction;
  • Financing is an important part of a property purchase, and in the initial information that we will request from you will be (in relation to a purchase) a request for details of how you will finance this purchase. In most cases this will be via a mortgage with a High Street lender. We work with most High Street Lenders, but there are some specialised lenders with whom we do not. We need to identify at this early stage whether we are able to deal with this or not – hence we will ask for clear information in this respect. If you are financing your purchase from your own funds, then we will need to determine where these funds have come from to comply with the latest Anti Money Laundering legislation. We will ask for source of funds and if these are from a 3rd party (ie not a registered lender) we will need evidence from them also. Without a clear traceable route of funds we will not be able to deal with your transaction;
  • On all purchases we recommend that searches are carried out, and indeed if you are borrowing money from a registered lender, they will insist upon certain checks being carried out. We will commission these and provide you with advice on these. It may well be that you wish to commission additional searches, and it is our policy to provide these to you (at cost), and only provide advice on these additional (non-essential) searches if requested;
  • If you are selling a property, you will need to produce various types of certificates relating to such things as guarantees for replacement windows, works done on gas or electrical installations. These can sometimes have got lost / mislaid, and we will assist you (as far as we can) to obtain replacements;
  • When you receive a Mortgage offer, we will advise you of the main points of such offer, so that you are aware of the obligations that you will take on if the matter proceeds;
  • We will liaise with Solicitors acting for your buyer / seller with an aim to ensuring that your transaction is ready when others in the chain are ready to proceed. It may be that your matter is ready and that your buyer / seller is not, or indeed someone further away in the conveyancing chain has problems with their matter. Essentially, we will not be able to complete on your matter until the entire chain is ready to proceed. This can often be annoying, as neither you nor we have control over these circumstances. All we can do is to progress your matter to a point where it is ready to progress and liaise with our counterparts on your related matter. We make specific mention of this as a great deal of frustration is caused from problems encountered by third parties over which neither you nor we have any control;
  • Once all matters are lined up, we will agree with you and your buyer / seller an exchange and completion date. Do please be aware that when you are purchasing a new build property you may not get an actual date and completion will be “on notice”, but this is a matter that you should seek further information on from the developer at the time of agreeing your purchase;
  • We will prepare any legal documentation (Land Registration forms) which you will need to sign and return in due time to facilitate the transaction;
  • After completion we will submit a registration of the transaction with the Land Registry and deal with any payment of SDLT.

 

The overall timescale taken for all these steps vary greatly on the complexity of the transaction and the length of the conveyancing chain, and therefore no guarantee can be given on how long it will take.

For example, if you are purchasing a property from someone who has no upward chain, and you are financing this from funds already in your possession, then the matter could be completed in a few weeks, however if your transaction is part of a large chain, then hold ups anywhere in that chain will impact you.

External factors such as timescales imposed by your lender, time taken for searches to be undertaken are common factors that can delay a transaction. Search timescales vary from provider to provider, and from area to area, and whilst we will can advise you of information provided to us in relation to timescales by the search provider, we have no influence over these.

Regardless of all these external factors you can be sure that we will progress the elements of your transaction that fall under our control promptly, with an aim to meet your expectations, however, delays may occur which are outside our control.

Excluding external factors, such as Government imposed restrictions, or extreme movement in the property market, which may be caused by Government or movements in the finance market, it is normal that a transaction would complete in 12 weeks.

CALL US NOW FOR AN APPOINTMENT

01525 712112

Monday to Friday: 09:00 - 17:00

Please note our office closes for lunch between 12:30pm and 1:30pm each day