How Did You Find Your lender Approved Property Solicitor?

[LenderapprovedSolicitor]

We wanted to find a home buyer conveyancing comparison where we could compare online quotes without entering our personal details. We simply typed in no personal details conveyancing comparison and we had a full page of websites that could help.

The main issue on reading up on this is that you must instruct a Solicitor that is approved by the lender that you intend to use. In other words you contact your Mortgage broker first to understand what you can afford and which lender you are likely to use.

We wanted to budget for our costs and so we just assumed that we were buying for cash. But when we do find a place and our offer is accepted we will revisit the comparison and filter correctly the results, as our Broker by then will have finalised who we should use.

We were looking at tall buildings but now have decided to look at New build as a safer and quicker option to complete. The Building Safety Act sounds a nightmare to me. Keep you posted

How did you budget for costs not knowing which Lender you would use?

are you in the UK? If so you can use a solicitor of your choice. Ring around local companies and ask. Some will have packages and prices others will quote. Normally based on value of home and if anything outside of the norm is required

Lender exchange.co.uk tells you whether a particular solicitor is on the panel for a lender

As tortephant says you can pretty much choose any conveyancing solicitor.

I think your main question is how much to budget? If so, there are basically two types of service to consider.

Firstly, there are national conveyancing specialists, which tend to be cheaper but some people find the service is sometimes poor. The other route is go for a local solicitor that does conveyancing, which is sometimes a bit more expensive.

In both cases you shold of course look to get a fixed price and read the contract to ensure you know what is and is not covered and what and how they charge for 'complications' etc.

Be aware there will be routine extra costs on top of the fixed price even in a smipe purchase for things like Land Registry fees, Local Authority searches, and sometimes other things relating to the specific requirements of the property you are buying. NB Some also charge extra for buying new builds and again more if there are leasehold/managing agents to deal with.

Ball park I would allow £2.5-3k in total for conveyancing costs for buying, or the quoted fixed price plus £1.5k. That would cover most scenarios except very complex ones e.g. deeds of variations required etc.

Our local solicitor is quite transparent about pricing so this might give you an indication of what types of extra costs might come up.

https://www.suttonmattocks.co.uk/pricing-transparency/residential-sale-purchase-and-remortgage-fees

Thanks for all your feedback - We used the comparison https://www.saveandconvey.com which we found really useful as you can view the costs without using personal details. Once we have found the property we will go back and firm up the quote. We have however reviewed the top 3 quotes as they stand now and we know which one we will go with. So managed to budget and once offer is in and accepted we will book the call back. Thanks all for the valuable feedback. It's definitely the disbursements that need to be managed and I will double check on my call back that all have been included