"Conveyancers were tackling huge volumes of cases at the time, and deserved some sympathy from their fellow mortgage professionals."
92% of mortgage brokers agree that conveyancers are “a vital part of the property transaction process”, a new survey from Groundsure shows.
While 6% disagreed, the remainder weren’t sure.
During the pandemic property boom, the performance of conveyancers became a frequent complaint of brokers looking to undertake business in a busy housing market. But Groundsure’s polling showed that the majority (54%) of mortgage professionals now admit that conveyancers had a tough time in 2022.
Furthermore, almost half (47%) of the brokers surveyed acknowledged that extra responsibility is now being put on conveyancers to check more things in the property transaction. While approximately a third (32%) do not think more responsibility has been put on conveyancers, 22% said they weren’t sure.
However, the polling demonstrated that brokers were only sympathetic to conveyancers up to a point. When asked, “Looking back on it now, do you feel sorry for the individual conveyancers tackling epic workloads in the pandemic mortgage boom?”, approximately two in every five of the mortgage professionals polled (39%) said they did not.
And, while 22% of respondents said the conveyancing industry was unfairly maligned by the mortgage industry press during the pandemic, 53% did not agree.
Malcolm Smith, Groundsure’s chief operating officer, said: “Conveyancers continue to work tirelessly for their clients, undertaking greater responsibilities on behalf of lenders — all the while facing attacks in the media. It’s nice that other branches of the property industry are capable of looking back at 2022 and releasing that conveyancers might not have deserved the monstering they received. Far from the villains of the piece, we should be celebrating the conveyancers as property superheroes.
“Our polling suggests some residual friction in the industry, left over from the febrile days of the pandemic property boom. That’s a shame as conveyancers were tackling huge volumes of cases at the time, and deserved some sympathy from their fellow mortgage professionals.
“It's clear that the different parties across the transaction need to understand each others' pressures and especially the degree of scrutiny and due diligence that conveyancers have to sign off. We are playing our part to make this easier on environmental and climate risks as each party increasingly focuses on this as new guidance emerges.”
