Securing the conveyancing service your clients want and need

At the time of writing, it’s just been announced that Elon Musk is going to buy Twitter in a deal valued at $44bn.

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Mark Snape | Broker Conveyancing
29th April 2022
conveyancing
"A more certain future should ensure that we move away from those periods when firms were dealing with huge numbers of cases"

That led to a BBC presenter asking – on Twitter of course – what would you do if you had that type of money? I’m guessing that you probably wouldn’t buy Twitter but then again, you’re not the richest person in the world.

Anyway, one of the answers caught my eye – “I would bribe my solicitors to get my conveyancing done. The normal couple of thousand appears to have no effect.”

I’m not sure if bribery is the best way to get a proper conveyancing service but you don’t need to be a genius to sense the frustration that this particular individual is obviously feeling. Who knows what firm he is using, but it sounds like he’s in the process of either buying/selling or both and is not getting to exchange/completion as soon as he would like.

Perhaps he’s not secured advice from his mortgage broker about which conveyancer to use? Perhaps he’s using a small, local firm? Perhaps he’s just simply unlucky? We do not know – but the fact he felt compelled to provide this answer is perhaps indicative of the type of experience a large number of home buyers and sellers are currently having.

The good news is that it’s not always like this, it doesn’t have to be like this, and I’m sincerely hopeful that the major resource issues large numbers of conveyancing firms are currently going through, will be sorted out sooner rather than later.

Now, I fully except that this doesn’t help the tweeter above, and it certainly doesn’t help advisers stuck in free legal conveyancing ‘hell’, neither does it help those clients who just want to get to the end of their transaction with their sanity intact.

We cannot gloss over the fact that the average housing transaction is taking between five and six months to complete but there are plenty of mitigating factors at play here, not least the huge ups and downs the conveyancing sector has been dealing with over the last 18 months and what that has meant for their ability to plan for the future.

Again, you might not care about this. Your problem is in the here and now, rather than the future, but again sorting this out will help advisers and their clients.

You’ll be acutely aware of the business you wrote during 2020 and 2021, and how it was no doubt boosted by the pandemic/lockdown/stamp duty holiday(s) and the like. And it was conveyancing firms – mostly the volume players – who had to deal with the bulk of this work, while at the same time dealing with their own staff working remotely, and those of every other stakeholder that they were relying upon. It made the job doubly difficult especially when you add in those stamp duty deadlines.

But what would follow was also always going to something of a guess. Think about that immediate period post-stamp duty holiday – what do you think would happen to the purchase market? How were you planning business-wise with the projected drop in purchase transactions? Were you looking at your resource levels in a difficult-to-call employment market? How did you plan to cope with those unknowns?

It was the same for conveyancing firms. As it turned out, that big cliff-edge drop that some were predicting did not happen, and again in good news for the entire conveyancing sector, the latest figures now appear to show a return to more ‘normal’ pre-pandemic market conditions.

Landmark’s recent Q1 2022 Property Trends Report shows no major surge or fall-back in transaction numbers which effectively allows conveyancers to prepare with a little more certainty and perhaps fill the resource gaps they were leaving open due to the unpredictable nature of what might happen during the past six months.

As you will know, firms have struggled to resource effectively because of the sheer number of vacancies out there and the fact that many businesses within the property sector are in the same boat. But a more certain future should ensure that we move away from those periods when firms were dealing with huge numbers of cases, were having to turn away new business, and as a result, transaction delays were growing and growing.

Again, if you’re currently going through such an experience with a client, it will come as little comfort to hear this, but a ‘normalised’ market with seasonal variations that fit that norm do mean firms can plan and prepare with a far bigger degree of certainty, and you should start to see the benefits of this as we move through the rest of 2022.

Of course, you can also help by ensuring clients aren’t going for free legal options or using a non-specialist, or not taking your advice in the conveyancing space. That also makes a huge difference and should ultimately mean that neither you or your clients feel they have to be billionaires to get the conveyancing service they want and need.

 

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