Guide
What are conveyancing fees actually paying for?
Updated
Conveyancing looks expensive for signing a few documents, and the signing is the last two percent of it. Knowing what the stages are makes it much easier to tell a firm that is progressing your matter from one that is waiting for somebody else.
The stages
Taking instructions and identity checks. Obtaining the title from HM Land Registry and reading it, which is where covenants, rights of way, missing rights and title defects surface. Ordering searches. Raising enquiries with the seller's solicitor and chasing the answers.
Then reporting to you, satisfying the lender's conditions, exchanging contracts, completing, paying the tax, and registering the transfer at HM Land Registry. Registration is the last step and it is the one that makes you the owner of record.
The SRA requires these stages to be published
Rule 1.5 requires firms to publish details of what services are included in the price displayed, including the key stages of the matter and the likely timescales for each stage.
That makes a firm's published stages a document you can compare rather than a marketing page. Two firms describing the same transaction with very different stage lists are telling you something about scope.
Where it actually stalls
Enquiries, almost always. The seller's solicitor is waiting on the seller, who is waiting on a managing agent, a freeholder or a builder for a document nobody controls.
On leasehold, the management pack is the single most common cause of a delayed exchange, and its cost and timing are set by the freeholder or agent rather than by either firm. Ask about it in week one rather than in week six.
The part that is not conveyancing
A survey is not conveyancing and a conveyancer does not do one. The lender's valuation is for the lender and is not a survey either.
Neither the title work nor the searches will tell you the roof is failing. That confusion is common and expensive, and it is worth resolving before you decide which survey to commission.