Conveyancing delays causing mortgage offers to expire

Over the past few weeks, I have noticed a lot of customers getting on the backs of solicitors to check the legal work is carried out in a timely manner to ensure completion before their mortgage offer expires. Some solicitors haven't responded at all until a week later, only then to highlight that some stages were missed and asking for documents that should have been requested upon instruction. Something really needs to be done on the conveyancing side. Not all conveyancers are bad or slow, but when they are, it's amplified a lot more as they're potentially putting the sale at risk and affecting someone's affordability, especially now. For all the time I have been in the mortgage industry, it's always been the conveyancing side slowing the journey down. Some mortgage lenders can issue offers within a week or so, some even quicker. There should be no reason in the UK that the average time of the house buying process should be longer than 10 weeks. It's understandable there are third parties involved that can affect the journey, but losing documents and not carrying out the necessary work on time isn't great. Many processes can and should be automated, online and stored centrally, meaning there's no need for so many physical copies of documents. We're in a digital age after all.

Conveyancing delays are not a new thing, they have always been there and nothing has really improved. Archaic systems and processes are only now really being highlighted because of the detrimental effect it is having on borrowers. 18 months ago an offer expiring was an inconvenience and a re-offer rate wouldn’t be dissimilar to what they had before, but now you are looking at double that. Many of these solicitors need to take a page out of the lender's books, namely close their doors and catch up before they start grabbing more business causing more delays.

Nowhere is this being felt more acutely than on remortgage cases with 'free legals', where they were already creaking before the mass influx of remortgage business of the past few weeks hits their inboxes. There are countless stories of completion deadlines being missed and clients going onto SVRs at a great additional cost, negating completely any saving from using 'free legals'. So my advice to borrowers is avoid the bucket shops, take a deal with cashback, and instruct your own solicitor. On purchases, too, there can be no excuse for mortgage offers expiring on straightforward cases yet we see it alarmingly regularly. Again, the issue seems to be the volume firms sitting on cases simply due to being at capacity, without doing anything proactive whereas we're seeing cases through our own recommended solicitors that even have searches back within 48 hours of instruction. This shows what can be done with a proactive conveyancer. It wouldn't be appropriate to name firms but the sad reality is that if you ask a room full of brokers and conveyancers which volume outfits are responsible for most delays, they'll almost certainly reel off the same list of names where their heart sinks at the mention.

I have a case like this on my desk right now, where the offer has been issued for six months and then extended for a further one month, and still the legal process will not be completed in time. The lender has already confirmed that they won’t extend again, meaning my client will need to reapply for the mortgage from scratch and be hit with a near 4% increase in their interest rate. Now it would be very easy to land the blame at the door of all conveyancing solicitors, but that would be unfair. Most housing transactions are a chain, so you can have the best legal team in the world, but if someone else has the worst you are all moving at their pace. The system itself is fragmented and involves lots of elements with no interest in how quickly you complete on your mortgage; land registry, local authorities and maybe even the lender you are leaving, have no motivation to be quicker than they are obligated to be. We as consumers also must take part of the blame; how many times have you chosen who will be doing the conveyancing work for your home purely based on the price they charge?

The concern we are now facing is shifting away from a purchaser market to people remortgaging. Typically, lenders offer a free service via a large factory-style firm, however more often than not the service is suboptimal with a real lack of customer care. Last week we spent much of our time chasing a certain firm that has taken nearly the full 6 months of a mortgage offer to complete their remortgage, despite being on a variable rate for that whole period. Countless complaints later thankfully our client's remortgage was completed but had it taken any longer my client would have faced thousands extra in interest if we had to reapply now. The worry for me is that clients are now applying as early as possible to secure a rate before they go up further. This means many customers may only have a matter of days for the physical mortgage to complete once the client is outside of their early repayment charge period, and I have real concerns many of these firms will not be able to cope with the demand they will be facing with a large volume of mortgages needing to complete within a small window of time. We could see more clients facing their remortgage offer expiring before their change-over completes, leaving them at the risk of much higher interest rates.

My main issue is the fee free ones that the lenders use, sheer volume alone means they will struggle to keep up and its not the fault of the staff, just the volume needed to keep the business in profit. I personally explain to all clients that whilst fee free seems like a good idea, the pitfalls are usually going to happen and I would always look for a better solution, even if it costs a few pouns more. As if you have the wrong company doing it, you may even lose that mortgage offer and that will currently cost you a hell of a lot more.