The issue of free legals has attracted concern among brokers in recent months as a result of issues with service levels and delays. However, BM Solutions said that by utilising an extended solicitor panel it would be able to “seamlessly” handle the expected increased demand for conveyancing.
The free conveyancing offer sits alongside free standard valuation for remortgages and a £250 cashback offer.
Phil Rickards, head of BM Solutions, said that free conveyancing will help drive down up-front remortgage costs for customers.
He continued: “By using an experienced panel of solicitors brokers can be confident their customers will receive the same top notch service for their conveyancing as they do from BM Solutions. It is also important that we continue to offer choice through our popular cashback products.”
Earlier this year Nationwide announced it was pulling its free legals offer, while Mortgage Solutions exposed the poor service standards on offer from some free legals firms.
Paul Flavin, director of Zing Mortgages, said to offer free legals means, whatever the service quality, some sort of cost is built into the client offering.
He continued: “Conveyancing may be a relatively easy check-list process to a certain point, which may mean that less qualified individuals can cover much of the donkey work but, when you rely on volume to generate profit it’s very rare that a quality of service will go hand in hand with the ‘stack it high and sell it cheap’ approach needed.”
“The conveyancing factories that we as brokers know we’ll be battling with as soon as ‘free legals’ is ticked as an option are not going to massively change their service levels. Until there’s a minimum qualification requirement for anyone working in conveyancing, this high turnover of unskilled staff is something we will all pay the price for. To allow for this though, either free legals will disappear or lenders will need to absorb a higher cost.”
