Online conveyancers...

[dilbertina]

Fingers crossed, we need to appoint a conveyancer to deal with the sale of our house. Should be straightforward sale of freehold to cash buyer. I have found online conveyancers charging a 3rd of what we are being quoted from local to house high street ones. We are living in France so will have no direct contact in any case.

Is it a bad idea to use online conveyancer if well reviewed? What are the pitfalls? Any recommendations? Many thanks!

I used Simpson Millar who were pretty good. Certainly better than the high street solicitors I've used in the past. You have a dedicated case handler so you always talk to, or email, the same person. They provide an online tracker so you can see the progress and when papers have to be signed they post them, which beats having to go to a solicitor's office during working hours.

I'd definately recommend them.

I think you need to have a proper recommendation from someone. We used an online conveyancer because they were cheap and they were rubbish. Didn't respond to emails, uncontactable etc etc. It culminated in them not paying our stamp duty to the Revenue. We found out when we received a massive fine from the Revenue some months after everything had gone through. Took the Ombudsman to sort it out (which they did very swiftly!!).

Thanks everyone! We decided it was too important to muck about with, and since we are currently overseas it's going to be difficult enough anyway... so we have decided to use estate agent recommendation of solicitor next door to their office. I did get him to drop price by £50 -better than nothing!

The less you pay for something the less you should generally expect as a level of service. They will have to cut costs to make a profit on delivering services cheaply. Maybe they will pay their staff less (and therefore have to get non-qualified staff) - maybe they are not available to answer your queries and you are just there to assist them when they need you. Maybe they can reduce overheads in another way, not affecting the delivery of a quality service.

My firm is thinking about offering fixed fee divorces. The lower cost option would be the client filling in a detailed form, then us preparing all of the paperwork and sending it out to them with instructions about what they then have to do (there's quite a bit). For a higher fee we'll take care of filing documents etc, but it wouldn't include advice over money issues or children.

As I say, you get what you pay for.

People want choice these days.