Conveyancing

Is the legal term for buying or selling land or houses.

In England & Wales, the professionals who deal with this are solicitors and licensed conveyancers. Throughout this section of the website your conveyancer is referred to as "your solicitor".

Do I Even Need a Solicitor?

If you are buying a property with a mortgage, then you'll need either a solicitor or a licensed conveyancer to act on the transaction. The mortgage lender won't trust you to deal with their mortgage monies.

Getting Started

You’ve seen the property you want to buy. However most people don’t think to instruct a solicitor until they’ve actually had an offer accepted. This can delay things and so you should try and instruct a solicitor as soon as possible. Most solicitors won’t charge you if your offer to buy a property is not accepted.

Why instruct a Solicitor so early?

Ideally your solicitor would wish to send out the draft Contract and all the supporting documentation to the Seller’s solicitor as soon as he receives confirmation from the Estate Agents that a sale has been agreed. However, before a contract can be sent out your solicitor must have in his possession all of the relevant paperwork. You must, with your solicitor’s help, complete a variety of forms that deal with property information and those things that are being included in the purchase. Your solicitor must obtain proof that those selling you the property do legally own it, usually by what are known as Official Copies and Title Plan from the Land Registry, as in most cases “Title Deeds”, as they were once known, are largely obsolete. If the property is leasehold, your solicitor is going to want confirmation of certain things from the Landlord. With advance warning of your purchase your solicitor can have this information ready to send with the Contract paperwork. This process can take between 1-2 weeks, sometimes longer in the case of leasehold property, so this process can take between 1-2 weeks, sometimes longer in the case of leasehold property, so early instructions will assist in reducing the time taken to get to exchange. “…early instructions will assist in reducing the time taken to get to exchange” What happens next? The Seller’s solicitor will examine the documents and may well raise some further enquiries that will need to be answered either by you, your solicitor, or in some cases by a third party such as the Local Authority.

What is Exchange?

Exchange is shorthand for Exchange of Contracts. The contract is the legal agreement for the sale and purchase of the house. There are two copies; one copy is signed by the Buyer; one by the Seller. At the stage where both parties wish to be legally bound by the agreement, a completion date is fixed and the two copies of the contract are swapped between their respective solicitors. The Buyer also pays a deposit of around 5% - 10% of the purchase price. At that stage, contracts are said to have been exchanged and the agreement is binding and cannot then be altered, except with the agreement of both parties.

When is Completion?

Completion is the stage in the transaction when the Buyer pays over the purchase monies and moves into the property. Ideally there would be an interval of a couple of weeks between exchange and completion, but this doesn’t always happen. Occasionally, exchange and completion will take place on the same day. The main problem with a simultaneous exchange & completion is that there's no guarantee that the transaction is going to happen until it does. In addition, if you have a property to sell yourself, there can be a chain of several transactions to synchronise, which can lead to problems. If you are selling as well as buying, any funds left over at the end of the sale transaction can be applied towards the cost of the purchase.