What can I expect my solicitor to do- buying a house in Wales

[26milesofcbeebies]

DH and I are trying to buy a house in Wales. We previously lived in Scotland, where it is common for your solicitor to be heavily involved in your house purchase. There, our solicitor made our offer to the estate agents, advised and negotiated on price and made recommendations when we got our survey.

Here, the house we want to buy needs considerable work. We have had survey done and it has come back saying that we need to further investigation into a variety of things (damp and timbers, electrics, roof), as we expected. However, what we do next is something of a mystery!

Do we arrange for people from the various trades to go and quote for the work? There is some talk of reports that we have to pay for- how do these differ from quotes? Do we just look at the survey and decide for ourselves what we need to get done or can we expect our solicitor to advise us?

Finally, the estate agents seem very involved here- they have offered to arrange for contractors to go in to do these reports. Is this normal? We don't want to show them the survey in case that compromises further negotiation (I think it also says in the survey that we are not to share it with anyone other than our solicitor).

So really, I would like some advice as to what we should be doing, and what I can reasonably ask our solicitor to do.

Any help gratefully accepted!

I've only bought in England, but AFAIK Wales and England are the same when it comes to house buying.

solicitors here do the legal stuff, nothing about the building and works done. (are Scottish solicitors qualified to do that?) Your solicitor will do searches and should advise anything that comes up, and also building regs checks (e.g if there's a gas boiler that needs building regs notification, your solicitor will make sure and not allow you to exchange without it).

the solicitor will NOT advise on any building issues - they haven't seen the house anyway. Basically it is all up to you, with help from tradesmen as you see fit.

surveyors are getting worse - while they are not electrical specialists, they should have reported on what the damp and roof issues are. It drives me mad when you pay a surveyor and they then tell you to pay someone else!

reports are NOT quotes, although you can be fairly sure anyone sent in to report on an issue will not come back and say 'no problem'.

involvement of agents is very variable - some do nothing except put houses on rightmove! The agent works for the seller and is making arrangements to try to get you to buy - but they won't pay for anything.

oops, bit of a ramble but HTH.

That does help, thank you. In Scotland, our solicitor went through the survey and made recommendations, said whether something needed further investigation or whether it was just the surveyor making us aware of something.

What is the difference between a quote and report? Would a quote be sufficient, if we said 'how much would it cost to fix the damp and replace these timbers if required', for example? The surveyor has been reasonable thorough, I think, but he couldn't tell us if the damp had got into timbers under the floor by the window, for example, and he couldn't give us an idea of cost to fix it (obviously).

Is the report just for us to work out whether or not we can carry on with the purchase or are they needed by the bank before they will offer the mortgage?

Sorry- so many questions! Going out now, but thank you in advance for any more responses

you probably need to talk to the bank to see what they want before confirming the mortgage.

a quote (in writing) will tell you how much it will cost to fix the problem. A report just says 'there is a problem and here's what it is/might be'