DIY Conveyancing 7 July 2006
Posted by Law-talking Guy in Conveyancing Wars, Guides, Readers' questions.comments closed
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)
Golf? 7 July 2006
Posted by Law-talking Guy in Conveyancing Wars.comments closed
My wife’s comment on reading yet another tired golf cliché:
“What’s with all the crap about conveyancers playing golf all the time? I haven’t met a single conveyancer who plays golf. Almost all of them are working their arses off every day!”
Not to mention the unpaid overtime!
Readers’ questions: “Should planning applications show in solicitors’ enquiries?” 7 July 2006
Posted by Law-talking Guy in Conveyancing Wars.comments closed
It depends on the enquiries made. A standard local authority search relates only to the property extent searched, so planning applications on neighbouring properties will not show up. If you want to find out about nearby planning applications you can approach the local planning office – some of them have full details online as well (e.g. Islington). An alternative is to ask your solicitor to make a separate search such as the ‘Plansearch’ provided by Landmark Information Group (their website has sample reports). This costs around £30.
If the seller has received notice of a planning application then they may reveal it on the property information form. However, as a prudent buyer, you ought not to rely on this and should always make your own enquiries.
Readers’ questions: “How much do conveyancers make a year?” 2 July 2006
Posted by Law-talking Guy in Conveyancing Wars, Readers' questions.comments closed
Interesting question. There are long and short answers, but let’s start with the long one. We can see from page 11 of this Law Society research fact sheet (.pdf) that a solicitor specialising in residential conveyancing might make around £40,000 p.a. – making this the second worst paid area of law.
However, let’s not forget that most conveyancing fee earners are not solicitors but secretaries, paralegals and legal executives. Many solicitors expect their secretaries to do a lot of the conveyancing for them. Often these secretaries end up in fee earning positions themselves. Some may choose to qualify as legal executives, licensed conveyancers, or even solicitors – if they have the time and money to devote to further education. In the meantime they are, to the firms employing them, a source of cheap labour. In this area of the law, where cost-savings are key (due to incredibly low or even non-existent profit margins), unqualified conveyancers working for solicitors enable firms to keep going.
The average case worker may well be paid less than an experienced legal secretary, but in any case is unlikely to be paid more than £30,000 p.a. and may be paid as little as £16,000 p.a.
The general formula for calculating the pay of fee earning lawyers is to take the total annual costs they bring in and divide by three. Therefore our solicitor on £40K should be earning the firm £120K a year, or £10K a month on average. Now consider that fees for conveyancing increase according to the value of the property involved. Also consider that leasehold properties (i.e. flats) take about twice as long to deal with. Naturally, the partners and senior solicitors will nab all the high value work (usually freehold) and so be able to earn more per file than the junior conveyancer doing flats for a pittance. Our solicitor can make his or her target of £10K a month by cherry-picking the most profitable work. Our junior, however, is stuck doing more work for less money and will therefore find it very hard to get a raise when the time comes to review their salary.
Therefore, the short answer is:
Not enough!
The Truth About Conveyancing 13 March 2006
Posted by Law-talking Guy in Conveyancing Wars, Trade Secrets.comments closed
Good morrow, and welcome to the web log that will change your mind about conveyancing. I’m your host, Law-talking Guy, an 8 year veteran of the Conveyancing Wars. If you don’t know what conveyancing is, head over to Wikipedia for a précis (and count yourselves lucky). Back already? Well, as you can see, this short entry does not do justice to the monstrosity that is conveyancing in England and Wales. Not for nothing is moving house said to be the most stressful thing you can do, and a big part of the reason for this is conveyancing.
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. Things like “there is some paperwork that must be processed before you can move in” or “the solicitor makes a Search in the Deeds at the Land Registry Office of Deeds and Registers to make sure no Mice have got into the Deeds Packet” (always beware of people who capitalise common words like ‘deeds’ or ‘search’ – they have an exaggerated idea of their own importance).
So here it is, the truth, what no conveyancing solicitor will tell you, straight from the horse’s mouth:
Conveyancing is very hard, highly skilled work. It makes us die a little inside every time you tell us to “just process the paperwork” or “chase up the other side cuz I want this all done yesterday” or ask “can’t I do without a local search?” or “do I have to extend my lease?” or “can I have a discount?”. Do you have any idea how much crap we struggle through every day on your behalf? How many rules there are and how often they keep changing? How easy it is to miss something important? How hard it is to do a good job under a large caseload? How much concentration and skill go into checking the title to your property? How much risk we take (because, let’s face it, for all your pushing for us to break the rules, you’re still going to sue us if anything goes wrong)? How many things we have to do for your lender? How little we get paid? How unique most transactions really are? How much we hate leasehold property?
I’m sorry if I sound bitter, but I am. This profession is a joke. We are held up to the highest standards of professionalism but are paid ten times less than the least professional people on earth (estate agents). Yes, I know some of you are willing to pay for quality, and for that I thank you. But others among you may think that £800 is expensive for conveyancing. What planet are you living on? It’s cheap at ten times the price (if done well)! The reason it is so low is… well that’s best left for another post. Of course with conveyancing, as with everything in life, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
There is a lot more to conveyancing than you will ever know, but this blog aims to change that. However, in the words of Morpheus:
“Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.”
The Matrix
Well… you get my opinion thrown in for free.
