What exactly does a conveyancer do?

Learning about conveyancing and selling your home

There can be many stages involved with selling a leasehold or freehold home, from the initial task of valuing the property and selecting your starting sale price through to searching for a buyer and aiming to get an offer that you can convert into an exchange of contracts.

At the end of the process there’s legal paperwork to sign and more as part of the exchange of contracts, as BPE Solicitors notes, after which the property sale is considered formally completed and you should receive the proceeds from it.

Conveyancing is a central part of this process and is done by a conveyancer – a qualified legal professional that prepares the home sale contracts and does other complex tasks.

This guide focuses on the role of a conveyancer when you’re trying to sell a property, providing crucial information on exactly what they do, how much they cost to hire, and what happens during the typical conveyancing process. You’ll also get details on whether a conveyancer is essential to selling a home, and issues that may arise if you don’t hire one.

In addition, you’ll find useful tips for how to go about finding a buyer for your house or flat once you’re ready to sell it, including the pros and cons of your various choices.

What is a conveyancer?

In very simple terms the conveyancer is responsible for taking care of the necessary legal paperwork required for you to transfer your ownership of a house or flat to the buyer.

But their actual role is more complicated and time-consuming. Conveyancers work to draft the contracts for sale, oversee the cash transfer for the purchase of the home, and also liaise with the UK Land Registry which is a non-ministerial department that registers property ownership in England and Wales.

Are conveyancers essential if I want to sell my home?

Problems with legal paperwork for your home can sometimes create the biggest headaches for completing a sale, including instances where you might have lost the title deeds and need to take some time-consuming steps to find them. It’s best to have a professional handle this.

You aren’t required to have a conveyancer and can try doing the work yourself, but it may quickly become stressful and potentially expensive if you make a mistake.

A conveyancer is different from a solicitor, because while the latter might be able to handle the home sale process if they’re fully qualified the former is trained specially for overseeing the buying and selling of properties. Most mortgage companies require that a buyer retain the services of a professional conveyancer before agreeing to lend money for a purchase.

What happens during the conveyancing process?

The conveyancing process begins when you first contact the conveyancer and instruct them to be your legal representative for the documentation involved in selling your home.

Once a buyer has made an offer on your home, the conveyancer will then perform various checks including identify confirmation and other steps to ensure that you have full legal ownership of the property that you are selling, such as contacting the UK Land Registry.

The conveyancer then will draw up a proposed contract with all necessary supporting legal documents for the review of the conveyancer hired by your prospective buyer. They will talk with each other about any questions they might have on behalf of their clients, and hopefully these can all be answered and both sides can proceed to agreeing on an exchange date.

The exchange date marks the moment when the contract for sale is signed and the purchase becomes legally binding, often referred to as the exchange of contracts.

Once this happens the conveyancer will be responsible for transmitting the title deeds and all other necessary legal paperwork to the conveyancer that is acting on behalf of the buyer and you will be looking to set a completion date. A completion date is often 30 days after the date of exchange. Your conveyancer will also oversee the transfer of the purchase money to your bank account.

How much does it cost to hire a conveyancer?

The average conveyancing fees involved with a home sale typically run anywhere from £850 and £1,500 and much more depending on how complicated the sale might be. The conveyancing costs for selling leasehold properties tend to be higher than those for freehold properties.

If you have missing title deeds or there are other additional steps that your conveyancer will have to take before all the necessary documentation is in place, you will have to pay extra for this. Although it’s fairly cheap to obtain your title deeds that prove you have ownership of a property, other costs involved with conveyancing can quickly rack up.

That’s why it’s important to always keep all legal and other paperwork safe and secure in a memorable location so that your conveyancer can have quick and easy access to them.

Four options for how to find a buyer for your property

As you proceed through the steps of getting ready to sell your home, one vital decision that you’ll have to make is choosing how to seek a buyer for the property. The options are often selling at an auction, selling to a quick buyer, selling via an estate agent or selling on your own.

All of these methods have particular pros and cons because of the time they take, whether or not they require sellers to pay commission, and more. Selling a flat or house through an estate agent or without any assistance, for example, can take many months and might even be longer than a year, whereas selling to a quick buyer typically takes just a handful of weeks.

You may find it helpful to narrow down the options by first writing down your main aims with the sale, such as your ideal property sale price, if you’re open to paying fees, and how fast you want to find a buyer. Then compare and contrast these issues against the specific information provided below about the four strategies, as this should show which best pairs with your needs.

Selling at an auction

A property auction is rife with uncertainty because there is no promise that you will receive a single bid on your home, which means that it would go unsold after the auction. You would then need to start over with searching for a buyer, delaying a sale by much more time.

The goal of an auction is to get several buyers interested in your property, so that they keep trying to outbid each other by placing bids of ever-increasing value on your home. If this scenario happens, there’s a better chance of making a decent profit on the sale.

Or you could receive just one bid at the reserve price, which is the minimum price at which you agree with the auctioneer your property can sell. This bid would be deemed a binding legal deal to sell your home, and the bidder could sue to enforce in the sale if you try to back out of it. Therefore, you need to calculate a reserve price that should generate a profit from the auction even after you have paid the auctioneer their commission. If you don’t, you risk only just breaking even by selling the home close to what you paid for it, or even selling at a loss.

Auctioneers charge commission for the effort they put in to selling your home by creating and advertising a listing that describes its main features and includes photographs of the interior and exterior, handling the auction itself and overseeing the completion of a successful sale.

To guide you in devising a reserve price, the typical auctioneer imposes commission at 2.5 percent of a property’s sale price, and this fee increases your expenses because it is taken out of the auction proceeds right away. If you want to avoid paying fees, you should consider instead selling to a zero-commission quick home buyer such as LDN Properties.

There are some auctioneers that could be open to reducing the rate of commission that they charge you, or having the winning bidder pay a portion of your costs, and both of these could help lower your expenses. Just note that other auctioneers may charge a rate of commission that is even higher than 2.5 percent, which would increase your costs even further.

Another drawback of selling through an auction is that it can have a lengthy schedule, with an extended waiting period of weeks or even months between when you select this option and when the auction takes place. If your house or flat manages to sell during the auction, the winning bidder then often has about a month to sign all of the required legal documents and handle the other actions needed in order to formally complete the sale, adding more delay.

One possible step to speed up the process is to ask the auctioneer if they will shorten the deadline for the buyer to complete these tasks. But auctioneers are not obliged to grant this request, and you may find some that give the buyer even more time than a month.

Selling to a quick buyer

Quick buyers are businesses like LDN Properties that don’t need to wait weeks or even months to initially get authorized for a mortgage to buy your home, as they already have the funds in place to immediately purchase it. This means they can finalize all the steps of buying a home within weeks, and that covers exchanging contracts and paying the seller the full proceeds.

This is by far usually the fastest way to sell almost any leasehold or freehold house, flat or other type of property. And it’s an ideal selection for someone trying to sell a home that potential buyers could see as a “problem” property because of some flaw. That’s because quick buyers make speedy and competitive offers to purchase homes no matter their age, condition, location, shape, size or type and regardless of any financial, legal or other issues with them.

For example, LDN Properties was founded more than two decades ago and since then it has purchased a broad range of homes across the UK. This includes, but is not limited to, dilapidated houses, properties with contaminated land, homes with equity release, flats with service charge arrears, houses with a boundary dispute, properties with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, homes near a petrol station, Tyneside/Crisscross lease flats, and almost countless other scenarios.

If you’re trying to reduce costs when selling, a quick buyer is also a good choice because the legitimate companies such as LDN Properties will never charge you any commission, so you can count on receiving the total sale proceeds. If you instead sold through an auctioneer or an estate agent, they would charge fees that are subtracted from the sale proceeds immediately.

And it’s a very streamlined, hassle-free and zero-stress approach to selling, starting when you call the quick buyer about selling your property. Within the first hour of talking they should be able to make an initial offer on the home, and you will have at least a week to think about it.

If you decide to accept that initial offer, the quick buyer will then send a representative to your flat or house in order to inspect the interior and exterior before the company makes a final offer. You will only need to agree to this single viewing when selling using this method, compared to potentially dozens or more viewings if you attempt to sell using other strategies.

Then the quick buyer will make a final offer and, if you accept it, they will work quickly with your legal representative to complete all of the necessary documents and finalize the sale through the exchange of contracts, with the whole timeline being just a few short weeks.

Selling via an estate agent

The third option for selling your property is enlisting the help of an estate agent, and this can be a good move for those homeowners that don’t want to put much work into selling. The estate agent will be responsible for the key steps, starting with putting together and promoting a listing, sorting out viewings, hearing any offers, and getting one through to exchanging contracts.

When you sell with an estate agent, you will also have to agree to possibly dozens or more viewings, where anyone interested in your home gets a chance to tour the inside and outside in person before deciding whether to make an offer. Many homeowners find these viewings to be time-consuming and intrusive, but they typically can’t be avoided when selling this way.

And an estate agent will charge you commission if they are able to sell your house or flat, usually charged anywhere from 1.15 percent to 1.40 percent of the property’s sale price. The exact rate can vary and might be above or below this range, depending on the estate agent. The fee is taken out of the sale proceeds right away, which will add to your expenses.

It’s also far from the fastest way to sell a property because it might take many months or longer to find a buyer. And there’s always the risk that someone makes an offer but then rescinds it, which they can do without penalty if contracts are not yet exchanged. You will then have to start again with looking for a new buyer, which will add more time to your selling schedule.

One way to avoid fees entirely and get a much more rapid sale is to get in contract with an honest no-fee quick buyer such as LDN Properties, because you will be guaranteed to receive the full sale proceeds without paying commission, and the process takes just a few weeks.

Selling on your own

Selling your home without any assistance will require a lot of time and patience, as the HomeOwners Alliance says. It’s usually only suggested for people that have successfully sold a property before, or that have a suitably experienced family member or friend that can help with the sale at no charge.

Without such knowledge, this can quickly become a highly stressful situation because you will have to take care of every step needed to find a buyer. You’ll need to create a listing, advertise, it, arrange viewings, hear offers and attempt to guide one to the exchange of contracts.

The average timeline for selling without any assistance can be many months and even more than a full year in some cases. And when you get an offer, the person making it might later change their mind and cancel, prompting the sale to collapse. You will then have to restart the search for another buyer, possibly adding much more time to the overall calendar.

The only clear benefit of selling without the help of an estate agent or an auctioneer is that you will prevent needing to pay a third party commission on your sale, which lowers your expenses. But it’s entirely possible that any financial saving you make a result of selling on your own is eliminated by the funds that you will have to spend on advertising your listing and other tasks.