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 selling 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 just put your property on the market. 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 you’re unsuccessful in finding a buyer and withdraw the property before you’ve had an offer 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 Buyer’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 sale. Your solicitor must obtain proof that you legally own the property, 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. Your solicitor may also need documents that are kept by your existing lender; therefore he must request those documents. If the property is leasehold your Buyer’s solicitor is going to want confirmation of certain things from the Landlord. With advance warning of your sale your solicitor 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 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 Buyer’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. In the meantime the Buyer will be carrying out their survey of the property, awaiting search results and finalising their mortgage offer.

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 buy yourself, there can be a chain of several transactions to synchronise, which can lead to problems. Your solicitor will then repay your mortgage and settle the Estate Agent’s bill. Normally he will deduct his own bill at that stage too. Any funds left over at the end of the transaction will be sent to you, or if you are buying as well as selling, applied towards the cost of the purchase.