Property purchase annoyance

You can’t compare a freehold, cash, chain free sale, three decades ago, to a leasehold purchase with a mortgage.

Our chain free leasehold purchase took four months ten years ago and we had a leasehold specialist conveyancer not a fixed price estate agent conveyancing house.

You need to calm down and accept house buying is a drawn out stresadul experience or you will drove yourself mad. There isn't a fixed time, it takes the time it takes (although I attribute some grey hairs to the three weeks our lender had a bizarre AML meltdown and refused to accept the source of our deposit was proceeds from a property that was sold the year before despite the conveyancer who acted for us in that sale writing to them with evidence).

The threat of charging you for emails is a strong signal from your conveyancer that you are expecting more service than you are paying for. (And probably pissing them off with too many emails).

Or do it yourself, I've done it 11 times to date!, it's not a difficult process.

8 weeks is incredibly fast!! Most take 12-16.

Ours took 10 months from when we instructed to when we completed.
It was a Shared Ownership property. Our buyer was moving from rented to ours. We were moving from ours to my Mums which I inherited when she passed away. Some dreadful mistakes were made, for example the draft Contract and the TR1 had different purchase prices on them and we were asked the same enquiries which we had previously responded to. The management company had responded three times to our solicitor yet he was asking them the same question too! It was diabolical.

They'd also passed our file to a different office and not only had we lost the original solicitors we had been familiar with, but they also opted to pass us on to a 'legal assistant' who was overseeing the transaction. So a lot of mistakes that he made weren't picked up. I get that everyone has to learn and that's fine, but when its something as important as a house sale, that persons work needs to be overseen by someone above them and this wasn't the case.

I used to work in conveyancing and would happily type all my own letters to clients, to the other side, to mortgage lenders, etc but every letter and I mean EVERY letter I produced was put in a tray and read and signed by my boss.

Its around 6 months for conveyancing in the UK I believe at the moment. 8 weeks in a you won't even be off the starting block!

I know it’s been 18 weeks, I read you OP. You said you though it should be done in 8 weeks and I am telling you that is a wholly unrealistic expectation except in very limited circumstances.

You bought for cash, no lender, a freehold property, thirty years ago? I mean apart from anything else, in our area local authority searches are taking 6-10 weeks to come back.

This is mad, we bought (cash so chain-free) in the 90s and it took less than a month from offer to us in there. It’s purely down to the solicitors in that situation.

Sorry, me again! By and large you can. I am a property solicitor, primarily commercial but I do some residential work for commercial clients. I charge hourly, rather than a fixed fee. This means my fee for a transaction is usually a fair amount higher than colleagues who only do residential work on fixed fee basis. We have billable hour targets, and fee targets, basic maths means that my fee structure allows me to take on less clients and therefore offer a better service. That said, if you need mangement packs, deeds of variation, anything that requires a third party, you can be as efficient as you want but ultimately you’re in their hands!

(it’s not entirely fair comparison as in general our fees our fairly decent, so none of our conveyancers need to hugely overwork themselves but you get the gist!)

That’s not your solicitors fault though?

This! There’s a race to the bottom on fees. If you want a solicitor with the time to really prioritise you, ultimately you have to pay a higher cost because the bottom line is at the rates most conveyancers charge, you need a lot of files to hit targets.

Did he actually say he was prioritising other files over yours? Sounds very un-solicitor like.

The difficulty is people will not pay proper rates for conveyancing so they have to take on to many files.

my hourly rate for a different area is £350 plus VAT and people want fixed fee conveyancing when in reality for a high risk area such as property it should be around £5k per average transaction at least if you were paying hourly rates.

That’s the sellers’ fault, not your conveyancer. I don’t think people realise how much price pressure has created this problem, as conveyancers have to take on so much work they are basically fire fighting all the time and there is no room for flexibility.

Honestly to be saying he is going to charge you more you must be being a nightmare with unreasonable expectations as they never do that.

FYI most searches take at least 6 weeks so unless yo you are a cash buyer and willing to take the risk of no searches 8 weeks is wholly unrealistic.

Im in the same position, its been 5 and a half months and finally today I got asked what my preferred completion date is. I was also told by the estate agent that the place I'm buying was chain free, turns out that was a lie. I had two months of my solicitor saying they were waiting for the management pack and the sellers solicitors saying they'd sent it. It wasn't being sent/received because the file was too big but because they seemed to refuse to speak to each other and the estate agent vanished the moment the offer was accepted, it took a ridiculously long time to sort out. Your solicitors sound particularly useless too.

There's nothing you can do, you have to just surrender to the process or you'll get yourself so stressed about it.

I’m on the other side of this, selling an investment flat- it’s a complicated transaction even for leasehold, and it’s been ongoing since September. I’m desperate to sell it and get on with planning our next move (there’s a lot of equity in the flat) and the buyer is desperate to move in.

We delayed ordering our management pack until the mortgage offer was secured on the EA’s advice (which took a couple of months), and then there was 21 days before the management co would respond and Christmas delayed things further.

My solicitor has been pretty decent (I have one contact who responds very quickly) but the sellers’ has struggled with the complexity.

At this stage I’m just hoping it completes before the end of the tax year. It costs me money to keep it empty. I’m so done with it now. I share your frustrations!