DIY Conveyancing

I must apologise that it has taken me so long to write this article; the subject matter tends to make me froth at the mouth and I have to be carried away for a cold shower. The straight-jacket also makes typing difficult.

I wondered why people might want to do their own conveyancing. Here’s what I came up with:

1. To save money. A potential saving of £400 – £1000 or so.
2. To have more control over the process and ‘cut out the middleman’, especially if they have had bad experiences with conveyancing in the past.

Then I thought why people might not want to:

1. There are many cases where it is unwise to act for yourself: if the property is leasehold, commonhold, unregistered, newbuild, or if there is a transfer of part. In fact, the only situation in which you should even consider representing yourself is if you are selling the whole of a freehold, registered property.
2. If you are buying with a mortgage then the lender won’t let you act for them. You’ll still have to pay a lawyer to act for the lender in checking the title and completing the charge. Their fees will be nearly as much as a standard conveyancing charge and you will have to copy all the documents you receive from the seller’s solicitors to them, as well as deal with their own enquiries, which are often numerous. They will probably catch something you missed and ask you to fix it, which you will have no clue how to do. Ultimately, you will waste much more time than if they just acted for you in the purchase to begin with.
3. If you’re selling and have a mortgage you will need to get the buyer’s solicitor to agree to pay off your mortgage directly as you will be unable to give the necessary undertaking yourself. They would be within their rights to charge you for this.
4. Who will hold the deposit after exchange? Your buyer is unlikely to be happy with you keeping it so you will need to arrange for the buyer’s solicitor to hold it for you.
5. Many buyers/sellers and their solicitors will be reluctant to deal with you directly and may advise their clients to pull out.
6. If you are buying a property, how will you know what to look for in the title? Can years of training, experience and shelves of textbooks be condensed into a single DIY conveyancing handbook that you bought for £10?
7. Houses are the most valuable asset people own. Why would someone pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for a property but balk at paying a few hundred to get the legal work done right? This is the equivalent of paying £50,000 for a guitar and putting it in a cardboard box, rather than buying a hard-case for £100.
8. The worst that can happen is you lose a few hundred thousand pounds and your house.
9. If a solicitor gets it wrong they have insurance and you can sue them. If you get it wrong you have no recourse.
10. You might miss a problem that would be obvious to a professional.
11. Remember the old saying: a person who represents themselves has a fool for a client. It would be rare for a conveyancing transaction to proceed without a few bumps along the way. How would you deal with problems when you may not even understand why there is a problem? Would the solicitor on the other side have to explain the problem to you? Why should they?

When people choose to act for themselves what it really means is that there is going to be more work for the lawyer acting for their buyer/seller.

In summary, you are perfectly entitled to act for yourself but it makes things much more difficult and therefore things usually end up taking longer. As I said in a previous article:

I am fed up to the back teeth with people who know nothing about conveyancing spouting off glibly about it as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Conveyancing is very hard, highly skilled work

I’ll end this piece with a look at a particularly infuriating example of the behaviour mentioned above, written by an estate agent no less! Fancy that! Isn’t it amazing how he’s managed to cover ‘all the tricks of the trade’ in 152 pages* when the Law Society’s Conveyancing Handbook runs to 1291 pages? Scam or genius, you decide.

(* according to Amazon)