Am I being ripped off by my conveyancing solicitor? Over 2k already

[Icanlickmyelbow]

My Conveyancing solicitor's fees are coming in at £2,236.23. The house I am buying is probate with no chain and no issues. With a purchase price of £185,000.
I am a first time buyer so foolishly took the advice of the estate agent to go with their conveyancer as they said it would be quicker.
The original quote was about 700 cheaper and they keep adding shit on. Is this normal? I have already asked them to remove a couple of things such as 'lifetime file retrieval' and 'fraud protection'.
In addition to the pictured breakdown they charged me £399 upfront for searches and another £50 upfront for 'other' searches. There is also a charge for coal-mining searches of £38.43. I just feel so ripped off by it all.
The house is a total dump and completely unmodernised. I will be living there with my 3 young children. I had planned to do some work to make it habitable, but it but it appears I won't have a penny left after the solicitor has taken their fee.
Can anyone tell me if this looks right?

I think they’re all standard things to be honest.

If they were standard then why didn't the quote reflect a more accurate price?

Money upfront for searches is standard.

The rest of it is how long is piece of string.

They have to do the coal mining search. Do you have a breakdown of the £450 for other searches?

The fees of £900 for the purchase seem about right.

Yes, fairly standard - but the fact they are fairly standard stuff begs the question why it wasn't quoted for to begin with.

Did you have other quotes from other solicitors?

This!

Did you ask for quote for their fees for the purchase alone, the purchase inc the the mortgage or one for fees plus outlays ?

Can you compare these costs to what they quoted you?

Fairly standard but it really depends on the exact detail of the quote. Eg was it “fee for our time of x plus the cost of searches”.
searches are essential and they can vary ry from region to region depending on risk (eg flood/mine/liability to pay for the local church’s roof replacement etc)

Their actual fee is only £899 and they have added extra costs for completing the SDLT form £100 £250 for acting for the lender and a portal fee of £35 so about £1284 in total plus VAT which is cheap!!!

The other costs are disbursements which your lender will insist on.

The i.d. checks are the only questionable aspect but if you were quoted that upfront then fair enough.

There is of course VAT at 20%.

Conveyancing is one of the highest claim areas for solicitors and costs have been driven down so much by online providers who are generally crap which had lead to hidden costs such as id checks.

I think these look about right, I know it’s expensive.

Try to remember you are absolutely doing the right thing by buying this property. You are investing in your and your kids futures. You are creating an inheritance for them. Security.

It'll be worth it, even if you have to delay your renovations.

They all look fully in order to me. You are purchasing with a mortgage so many are required by the lender so no choice, you can't instruct them not to incur them as otherwise you won't get your mortgage. The extra searches are where things have been flagged or come up in the usual pack and are then required, again to satisfy your lender requirements.

More than I paid but depends where you are located I guess. I was in a small north east town

Conveyancer here. These are all standard charges. Conveyancers should not do quotes only estimate of costs as it is impossible to determine costs at the outset without seeing the contract paperwork.

It does infuriate me that people do not bag an eyelid at the eye watering estate agent fees but complain about lawyer fees when we are taking on the risk.

I know this feels painful but the work involved for the conveyancer is the same for a £200K house or for a £900K house. The fee is the same as we paid in 2013 for a truly useless conveyancer and very similar to what we paid a brilliant conveyancer in 2022. So the fee you pay doesn’t change in proportion to the value and they’ve not gone up in years, certainly compared to say, building work.

On the positive side, in terms of move in costs, you will have paid little or no stamp duty.

so, whilst you should have shopped around and not gone with the estate agents choice, hopefully they will do a decent job for you.

If the house needs work you’re really going to have to learn to shop around, get quotes, check prices and understand pricing really well. For everyone you deal with going forward.

Treat this as a learning experience?

The bits above the "our Professional fees" are disbursements as someone mentioned earlier in the thread.

Disbursements are third party charges that aren't kept by the conveyancer. So the search fees are the fees charged by the search provider and get passed straight on.

I am a property solicitor and normally feel very strongly about people not using solicitors recommended by agents (there's normally some sort of financial kickback and good firms don't need to pay to get work, they're normally overrun as it is) but in this case the actual conveyancing fees look quite reasonable.

Those Legal costs are cheap for a solicitor who has spent a lot of time and costs qualifying for what will be a major life purchase . It will equate to less than 4 chargeable hours for most solicitors. The disbursements will
not be a cost the solicitor will benefit from and are not a legal cost as such. Please don’t be fooled into thinking that the solicitor keeps those costs. The estate agents cost will be way higher to put it into perspective.

Filling in the sdlt form is a doddle, takes about an hour even if you know nothing so do that yourself.
Our solicitor took it off but did it themselves by accident (wrongly, twice), so you can probably do a better job yourself cheaper.

It looks about right to me , I’ve just paid £1900 in conveyancing to sell my late father’s house with no mortgage etc involved .I didn’t use the solicitors recommended by the estate agent however and sourced my own .
FWIW , a coal mining surveys essential in an area with a history of mining

I’ve been roughly quoted £1600 on a £240k house, but I’m fully expecting it to be more. I’d never use someone recommended by an estate agent however. My local mortgage advisor recommended the (very well reviewed) local solicitors - she was upfront she got a referral fee and I was ok with it as I did my own research too. I’ve been very happy with them thus far and they’re a three minute walk away which is a bonus!

This will be a distant memory soon - just hang on!

But EAs don’t get paid every time whereas solicitors do? Lots of sales fall through and most EA work on a No sale, No fee basis.

Plus EA sometimes do a lot of work like the last place we sold had over 20 viewings before a sale was agreed, done by the EA. And then there were tricky negotiations that they advised on & led. In terms of man hours, they seemed to do a lot more than the solicitor.

Not to mention a lot of people DO complain about EA fees.

This sounds about right. Decent solicitors are expensive.

This is just part of the costs of buying a house. I know you feel unsettled by it all because it is a lot of money but once you have your house and you've made it your home over time this will fade.

It's going to be so exciting for you all!

Honestly having had shit conveyancers I just pay a ton of money for someone who's good. At the moment I'm going through a tricky sale and they have been excellent. Really don't scrimp on legal advice.

Fees should be a fixed % of the purchase price plus searches

Why? It isn’t necessarily any more work if the property costs 1M or 200k.

Seems very standard to me.