Why You Need Conveyancing Solicitors

Moving a house can involve a complicated legal process. It’s important to get this process right – as any mistake could result in the transaction not being valid in the eyes of the law. There exists an entire class of legal professionals whose job it is to look after transactions and to get them over the line. These are known as conveyancing solicitors.

What are conveyancing solicitors?

Any solicitor that specialises in property is considered a conveyancing solicitor. It’s possible to do the job of conveyancing without being a fully qualified solicitor, however – these professionals tend to be referred to simply as conveyancers.

You can find an affordable conveyancing quote online, if you use the right online quote builder. If you’re after local experience, on the other hand, you might prefer to stick to local solicitors.

What’s involved in conveyancing?

The process of selling a property involves a series of definite steps, which must be taken in the right order for the transaction to go through.

Documents and Forms

Among your conveyancer’s most important duties is to ensure that the paperwork is completed properly. The most important forms include filling and contents, which specifies exactly what’s included in the sale and what isn’t (for example, your seller might be taking certain appliances with them and leaving others behind). There’s also the property information form, which will detail the boundaries of the property, and other important facts.

Property searches

It might be that there are plenty of things you don’t know about a given property – and searching is the process of uncovering that crucial information. Your mortgage provider may insist that searches are carried out before the transaction goes through – since they can uncover hidden risks that might otherwise have been hidden. It might be that your property is at risk of flooding, but that this could only be discovered by examination of historical data.

Exchange of Contracts

Once both parties to the transaction are happy to go ahead with it, contracts can be exchanged. Beyond this point, you are committed to the purchase of the property. This means that if you do decide to pull out, you’ll be unable to retrieve any deposit you’ve laid down.

Completion

The final stage of the conveyancing process is called, appropriately enough, completion. It’s at this point that your convenyancing solictor will provide you with a final bill that will need to be transferred into your solicitor’s account in advance of the purchase. Some transactions take awhile to clear, and the day of completion can often involve several transactions depending on one another in a long chain. For this reason, it’s important that the funds are in place as early as possible.