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Conveyancers are as fed up with housing completion times as brokers and buyers – Rudolf

by: Beth Rudolf, director of delivery at the Conveyancing Association (CA)
  • 21/03/2022
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Conveyancers are as fed up with housing completion times as brokers and buyers – Rudolf
When it comes to the house buying process, and particularly conveyancing, then I’m going to fundamentally disagree with the song, ‘It’s Not Where You Start’, which of course begins with the line, ‘It’s not where you start, it’s where you finish’.

While conveyancing firms have undoubtedly grappled with unprecedented levels of activity over the last 18 months or so, at a time when their resources were stretched to their limit, I know that no one within our industry will be happy with the current timescale to completion.

There has been a growing level of frustration with a number of areas which have all contributed to significant delays, and advisers are often left trying to explain why those bottlenecks occur and when their client’s case might work its way through the system.

You may well have seen recent data from Landmark which suggests that the process takes more than five months to complete – 157 days to be exact – and again, I reiterate the point that it feels unacceptable to us as much as it does to you and your clients.

It’s why a major part of our work has been around the ways and means we can utilise to bring those completion timescales down. Including – amongst others – greater provision of upfront information, instruction of conveyancers at the point of marketing the property, our push for property packs and logbooks, ordering of searches and title documents at the start of the process, the potential use of binding offers and the like.

As you will have noted from the above, a lot of this work is done at the start because by doing this you ensure that you’re ahead of the game, not having to wait weeks on end for tasks to complete which could have been done upfront.

 

Avoiding common delays early

This is the key part of any debate around improving the timescale of our process and helping eradicate a lot of the aborted transactions that blight our marketplace.

The point is simple – the more information offered upfront, the more parts of the process get done at the earliest of stages, the less likely you will find problems and issues appearing down the line which scupper the entire transaction.

If you have secured your mortgage offer upfront, if you have verified the client’s identity upfront, if you have clarity on their source of funds upfront, if you have the searches and title upfront – I could go on – then you have a much better chance of avoiding any additional enquiries and post-valuation queries that again result in delay as you await their answers.

It is, without doubt, all about how you start.

Otherwise, we all find ourselves in a situation where viewings have taken place, emotions are high, offers have been put in and accepted, without the potential purchaser having full clarity and transparency on what exactly they are going to buy and which lender will lend.

On so many occasions that clarity comes far too late, and by then, cost, time and resources have been expended, and the process either has to limp on to a conclusion over a longer timescale, or it is simply ended altogether resulting in the losses we know only too well.

 

Advocating change

We know the process is not fit for purpose right now and therefore change has to come. Those who rail against any sort of change are unlikely to be thinking about you, the adviser, or your client, the consumer.

Otherwise, they would be fully supportive of, for example, the work of the Home Buying and Selling Group who are trying to shift the sector and the process to a far more efficient one.

Conveyancers have to deal with the delays in obtaining key information from stakeholders in the process, while also managing the expectations of those clients affected to their detriment by the delays in the provision of this information.

By joining up technology and sharing data upfront we can ensure the improvements we make today to the process will make all the difference with a far more user-friendly, transparent and streamlined process for all involved in conveyancing in the future.

This will happen -of that I have no doubt.

Again, how long it takes to get there is up for debate. But what isn’t is that industry support is vital because it will be the industry which has to deliver on this. We have made more than a start here, but we do have some way to go to get the finish we want.

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