Solicitors - is this normal?!

[Rapunzel91]

Ugh, why is moving so stressful!

My DH and I accepted an offer on our house on 05/06 and got our offer accepted on the property we’re buying on 06/06. From then we instructed a solicitor, survey and mortgage company right away. We had our mortgage approved a few weeks ago and our survey back too but omg what have the solicitors even done?!

I got an email on Friday asking to clarify funds that were clarified in June… No one’s answering phones and emails and today we’ve found out through the estate agent that they haven’t started searches! Seriously?! What have they done all this time?! I was expecting searches to be close to complete now.

Any advice?

I work with solicitors/conveyancing companies every day. In my experience lots of them are reactive rather than proactive, so you'll need to keep on at them to get things moving. Send a strongly worded e-mail to the person who is handling your case with a deadline to come back to you. Good luck!

Have the seller's solicitors sent the draft contract pack yet?

Many buying solicitors won't start any legal work until they've received confirmation of the name of the solicitor acting for the seller and the draft paperwork has been received.

Don't the solicitors normally ask for a few hundred pounds down to start searches more or less at once.
If they have done nothing , perhaps you could change, and explain to the new one why?

What solicitor are you using? I used a big one that I thought would be good and they were horrendous. If you've already paid I'm not sure if there's much you can do about it but a good way of getting them going is by threatening to remove the instruction, regardless of your cost.

I ended up doing as much as I could myself. It ended up taking 20 weeks and that was with a lot of pressure.