Solicitors conspire to drag out conveyancing

[SweetCruciferous]

AIBU to think solicitors deliberately eke out every step of the conveyancing process as a deliberate ploy to justify disproportionate fees for simple boilerplate admin tasks amounting to no more than a couple of days’ work?

This is my suspicion. Can anyone confirm this? Any heretic solicitors? AIBU?

Exactly @midgebabe

Its been the very poor communication and lack of professionalism that has really struck and surprised me – repeatedly being told (over weeks) – we’ll do that today, then hearing nothing, emails ignored and phone calls not returned, I suppose a bit of a sense that as a member of the public the impression of them is all a rather inconsequential.

Indeed they do exist, those are not professional builders. Then you have various trading organisations and the small claims court ..not sure what the equivalent is when the legal guys mess you around?

@StCharlotte

That doesn’t make it OK

Is the bar for the legal profession really set as low as that for cowboy builders?

See our builder went and did other jobs, but he mentioned it and it didn't put back our build beyond the timescales we had agreed to.

Wtf? They charge fixed fees for conveyancing. It would be actively in their interest to get things done faster if they could. Would make the work a hell of a lot more profitable.

I used to work in conveyancing (thankfully no longer) and the workload was ridiculously high. I used to do 1-2 hours unpaid overtime per day as a matter of course, and at peak times people would be working all weekend and until 10pm.

This was for 16k a year, hopefully other firms have more realistic targets, but I suspect that OP's conveyance is just swamped.

Just seen your update OP, that is unacceptable if they have been sitting on the documents for months and are not following up when you are chasing them.

Sounds like the whole system is broken , if the bods doing the grunt are suffering , and at 16k a year their salary is covered by a few clients, and the clients are suffering , bet someone somewhere is raking it in

You should do your own conveyancing then OP, with your law degree and regulated company...

From what I've heard conveyancing is going through a massive boom due to the stamp duty holiday. Conveyancing is at pre-2008 levels round here.
Also, your solicitor might be crap which doesn't help.

@MummaGiles aye I know they don’t make more if it’s slower but I suppose there aren’t any penalties either?

From what I’ve read on the thread so far (and others), it seems the extended, indefinite time frames are possibly down to taking on as many clients concurrently as possible (someone upthread said turning down work was ‘unprecedented’) and a tendency toward poor communication (i.e. rather than giving a realistic time frame “we have some delays so it could be up to two weeks before we can do x”, it might be they promise to do something the same day then only respond again when prompted, then do the same again for weeks at a time, etc.) Obviously not suggesting this applies to every single solicitors!

Wow @Cassie124

16k salary for hours of unpaid overtime in a skilled role??

That’s outrageous.

Bit snippy @MinecraftMother!

@midgebabe Once the machine has read the legal document, then what does it do? What if one of the documents it reads doesn't align with another of the documents it has read? I think you are perhaps showing your naivety about the majority of legal work.

Conveyancing is unprofitable - the low fixed fees compared to the massive indemnity insurances / staff costs / rents firms have to pay, mean their margins are tiny. The only way firms can make any money is a quick turnaround. They don’t want to get bogged down with lots of phone calls or massively long / complex cases, charging the same as a simple sale.

This is why lots of conveyancing “factories” have popped up, given low fees and providing inferior client care. People shouldn’t forget “you get what you pay for”.

It’s unfortunate that people don’t value a conveyancing solicitor more highly, because for most people it will indeed be the biggest purchase of their lives.

Your conveyancers sound a bit lax with the communication but you cannot generalise. Have you actually asked them the nature of the delay? No solicitors on a fixed fee would drag the work out for the sake of it. And yes there are "penalties",especially when they have billing targets based on completions each month.!
Plus you can request a copy of your file after the matter has completed if you are unhappy with the service or bill which will show the exact timeframes the work was carried out in. So a solicitor dragging their feet for the sake of it makes no sense at all.

People shouldn’t forget “you get what you pay for”.

Absolutely. People want conveyancing done as cheaply as possible and then complain when the service is not very good.

My conveyancing solicitor was downright incompetent.
I wont bother with the details, but 9 years later I still warn people away from them. Pathetically bad and unfortunately quite well known around here.

Solicitors in the UK are generally underpaid, particularly in areas like conveyancing. Long hours for a passable salary.

I'm not currently in the UK but my firm does some residential conveyancing and it's probably our least profitable work. The fixed fees dont properly compensate for the time spent, so we usually just do it for existing clients or friends. If you're doing solely conveyancing work, it needs to be high volume.

Obviously if you're receiving shitty service, you're going to be unhappy, but your solicitors are likely not trying to screw you. They'll be dealing with mountains of work and stress for little reward.

My experience with our solicitor has been great, she has been great at keeping in touch and coming back to me when I've had questions.

Our buyer is using a "conveyancing factory" and frankly they are the one's who are causing the issues.

You get what you pay for...in our case its been worth every penny.

I thought most of them were conveyancers rather than actual solicitors? Having had pretty poor service I paid for a solicitor last time and my experience was much better!

Having dealt with conveyancing I can tell you that this is absolutely not the case. We have to make sure you are not buying something with problems such as ground rents, service charges (even on free holds), covenants etc there are many documents to obtain and read through, etc
And given how little people want to pay, solicitors have to take on huge volumes of work to make it profitable. You may be surprised to find that your solicitor will have many other cases. The work Solictors do is far more involved than what the estate agents do yet they get paid more.

I was told by my solicitor that it was the council and searched holding up my purchase. Little did they know that I worked for the council, in the same office as the land charges team. I knew that the searches had been returned over a week previously. There were very red faces when I informed them and all of a sudden my sale/purchase was full steam ahead.

You need to see the thickness of the file we have for each property. I do conveyancing for commercial properties. We have several clients at a tube and you have to contact several different parties for different sides then wait for them to come back only to find that you haven’t got everything you need from then son you go back...,the searches are going on and they take as long as they take, the finance is being checked.....

I’m an Administrator for a small, independent legal firm in the south. Before I took the job approx 2 years ago I might have been inclined to nod my head and agree with you OP, based on my own personal experiences of moving homes over the years.

However, I’m not going to!

We charge a fixed rate for conveyancing matters and stick to that, regardless of whether the sale/purchase turns out to be more complicated than originally anticipated. That fee may seem high to you but it doesn’t just cover the solicitors costs, it covers their secretary’s wage and all the usual costs involved in running a business (rent, utilities, rates, etc). Any disbursements you pay to us don’t end up in our pocket by the way.

We are one of the lowest priced conveyancers in our area AND all of our work is generated by word of mouth. So we must be doing something right!

It’s all very well being instructed to act by a client, the second a said is agreed, but if that client is selling and doesn’t get the basic protocol forms completed and returned to us in a timely fashion, then of course it will take time for us to draft and send a contract pack to the buyer solicitors. And vice versa from a seller’s solicitor to us if our client is purchasing.

Then there are the searches on a purchase. Out of the 3 usual searches, the Local Authority search is ALWAYS the last to come back (approx 3-4 weeks). Solicitors then have to review the search results and report to their client, plus raise enquiries with the sellers solicitor.

Throw in a leasehold to the above and you’re relying on the response times of managing agents or freehold management companies to provide pertinent information.

Oh and if you are financing your purchase with a mortgage then the mortgage offer takes time to come through to us from the Lender. Clients don’t always realise that we act for the lender in most cases too. We also send a report letter re the mortgage to clients so they understand what they are taking on.

Let’s throw in Help to Buy ISAs and gifted deposits from family members; and sales where probate hasn’t quite been granted; plus finding out the property in question has never been registered with the Land Registry before!

How about getting all sellers and buyers in a chain of 3,4,5,... properties to agree to the same exchange and completion dates?

PLUS this year the chancellor decide to offer a stamp duty holiday until March 2021. So MANY people have jumped on that and want to purchase a property before the above date in order to save thousands of pounds in stamp duty. Who can blame them? Several firms local to us stopped taking on new clients 6-8 weeks ago because of this. We are all inundated with work but trying to do our absolute best to get people moved before the stamp duty holiday ends. In many cases, before Xmas.

Then the biggest bugbear? Estate Agents telling clients untruths (because they want their commission) and then said clients calling us demanding impossible completion dates.

If it was easy and simple to buy property, whilst ensuring you weren’t buying a total piece of rubbish with potentially awful restrictive covenants, then everyone could do it themselves.

If you think about it, the c£1000-£1,5000 you pay a solicitor (per sale/purchase) is peanuts compared to the amount you are paying for the property itself. You pay more to the estate agent who actually does very little in comparison, once a sale is agreed!

When you call your solicitors office and are told your solicitor is with another client or engaged on another phone call. Don’t assume they are bothered with your matter. They can’t work on your matter only or they would go out of business. We are constantly juggling matters PROFESSIONALLY and want nothing more than for your sale and/or purchase to go as smoothly as possible.

Sorry if the above seems a bit ranty. It’s not intended that way at all! In fact this is my first ever Mumsnet post dispute lurking here for years. I just want you to understand things from the other side of it.