Currently trying to buy a house and it’s a nightmare, solicitors putting in minimal effort and getting things wrong, then taking forever to fix things. Any time I mention this to someone it seems they have a similar story.
A lot of firms seem to treat conveyancing like hoovering the living room before your mum comes to visit: It should be a quick job, so it’s done at the last minute.
This all goes sideways if there is an unexpected complication, when they finally get to it 5 months and 14 days after the mortgage offer comes through.
Apparently there were price wars for the business in the 90s, so lots of companies treat it like fill-in work for when more lucrative tasks don’t need to be done.
You get what you pay for with solicitors. The no completion, no fee ones are the bottom rung, and from then on it improves.
I’m in the process of buying a flat at the moment and the solicitors are taking their time, I can’t tell if that is just how it is or if it’s their fault to be honest. The updates we get from them sounds like they are following up enquiries from the seller’s solicitors but who knows. We were hoping to complete soon but looks like it might be another month or two before that happens.
I think for some solicitors, conveyancer is low priority as there isn’t much money involved and there is no pressure to get it done quickly, which is why it can drag on.
The updates we get from them sounds like they are following up enquiries from the seller’s solicitors but who knows
We’ve just recently bought a house and were on pretty good terms with the people we bought from so we got more updates direct from them than from our solicitors. Literally any time our solicitor said they were chasing or following something up from the other end, their solicitor would be saying “no, no, we sent that across weeks ago” and vice versa. I’m pretty sure it’s just standard practice to always blame the other side and they’re all in on it, because there’s no way for anyone to prove the hearsay.
Odds are the whole thing could be done and dusted inside a week but they stretch it out as long as possible so that they can charge a fortune.
