Conveyancing woes

Buying an expensive, illiquid asset and committing to a huge long-term debt should never be quick and easy. The costs of making a mistake are potentially massive, so it's right that the process is rigorous and not just a "click here to buy" type transaction. That being said there are certainly areas of the system that can and should be improved, as long as they can be done so without compromising the safety of the buyer (who is likely not going to be thinking too clearly at times, blinded by their desire to be moving into their new dream home). The main issue with making changes to the system is that it requires amendments to regulations and in some cases laws, but with regulators and Government up to their necks in other things (like impending civil unrest over the energy price cap increases and ever-growing strike action across multiple sectors, to name a couple) they're hardly going to be looking at this anytime soon. The other issue is that any changes to the speed of property transactions are likely to require additional resources (so more money) in both Local Government and at the Land Registry, I'm not sure that spending a lot of extra tax-payers money in these areas is high of their agenda either currently.

Time is one thing we seem to have on our hands at the moment, but it cant all be blamed on conveyancing, today I received an email from a lender and they are working on cases from the 18th July, so we have to wait 4 weeks just for an update. They system is broken, something needs to be done to bring it up to date, buying a home is a already long and expensive process, we dont need to add to it

This part of the process is taking longer than it ever has done before and the frustrating part is that it could be improved drastically with a few minor improvements to the process. Communication is a large part of the problem, buyers do not know where they are at and what the next steps are so they try to contact the solicitor to ask questions and then solicitors get bogged down on the phone or more likely ignore the phone all together, making things worse. It wouldn't require too much to either provide buyers with a clear map of the conveyancing journey and estimated timescales for each part of that journey and even better a system which is updated by the conveyancer to show the buyer where abouts they are on that journey and what is needed in order to move on to the next step. So much of the frustration comes from not knowing what's going on as opposed to the actual amount of time its taking.

The main delay we are seeing during conveyancing is where the clients have purchased properties within the last 6 months, have completed works on the property and are now looking to refinance. In these cases the completion for the refinance is being delayed as Land Registry have still not processed the initial deeds from the purchase. I have had cases waiting over 3 months for this after the remortgage offer has been issued and clients having to have offers reissued as their original remortgage offer has expired whilst waiting for land registry. Even when requesting the case to be expadited at Land Registry the waiting times are still crazy. On top of this solicitors (along with everyone else in the industry) seem to be massively overworked with auto responses on their emails to advise its taking over 3 working days for them to respond. I am not sure what could be done to help this problem, maybe Land Registry need to employ more staff or streamline their process where possible.

We are finding that in the main our application to exchange timeframes are still very good and as a business running at an average of 12.5 weeks. We work closely with a small, local conveyancer who we have built up a relationship with over the last 18 months and they are excellent and really work hard for our clients to get things done. They do not take on more work than they can handle like a lot of the bigger national firms or firms who are on panel with Estate Agents which means they can get cases through and actually work on our clients cases rather than only working on them every couple of weeks. And best of all they do not rip our clients off which is a big thing for us - a lot of people are paying a lot of more for a below avergage service.