It was intriguing to watch the recent verbal evidence session of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’ Committee, which is looking at the ways and means by which the Government could, and perhaps should, be improving the home buying and selling process.
In a system of many moving parts, with many stakeholders and many interactions, it might feel like a difficult issue to solve. Which is perhaps why Governments of all colours have tended not to get too involved, leaving it, for the most part, up to the ‘industry’ to sort, without wanting to regulate or legislate, which quite frankly in some areas, is going to be the only way to get the change we need.
I suspect that approach will need to come to an end, regardless of which party makes up the next Government, and to be fair, it is positive that we have this Committee running its Inquiry which will feed its recommendations into the powers that be.
Sometimes, what was more interesting was not the verbal evidence and solutions provided by a number of our key market representatives – excellent though they were – but the questioning of some MPs who might be coming at this issue from a rather misguided direction.
For example, it was interesting to hear one MP raise the issue of ‘conveyancing factories’ – a term I’d not heard for a very long time – asking whether they were negatively impacting on the sector and were a root cause of delays in the system.
To say this felt like a mis-reading of the current market environment would be something of an understatement, with Beth Rudolf of the Conveyancing Association helping him get to an opinion where he recognised it was simply a “pejorative term” for larger-scale conveyancers who do this kind of work day-in/day-out, invest heavily in the sector, utilise technology to make improvements, and are at the cutting-edge in terms of wanting to improve the process for all.
This is a message that we’ve been pushing for many, many years, and it felt to me that this lack of industry knowledge was a useful reminder to all conveyancing stakeholders that there is still a perception from some that bigger firms who are totally focused on conveyancing are somehow on the wrong side of history.
As we tend to know, the opposite is actually true and the real problems in the conveyancing space tend not to have come from these larger scale, specialist conveyancers but from what we might deem the ‘dabblers’.
Again, this is a well-trodden argument, particularly for advisers who are not involved in the conveyancing advice process, but it’s still true to say that by allowing your client to choose their own conveyancer, or simply use the recommendation of a family member, or just walk down the high-street and pick one, then you are heightening the risk of a transaction taking longer than anticipated, and as a result, you are also heightening the risk of the transaction not happening at all.
Either way, you’ll be waiting longer to get paid for the completion, or not getting paid at all, and the work you have carried out up until that point won’t be rewarded.
Of course, that risk is heightened if the client is purchasing within a chain, and multiple parties are also using non-specialists. Perhaps they are using a solicitors’ firm whose conveyancing team is small or just the one person or only work part-time or just happen to be on holiday at that moment, or unfortunately are dealing with multiple cases on their own, or indeed all or some of the above.
Perhaps their systems are just not up to scratch, perhaps they don’t use the technology available to them, perhaps they only use paper-based systems, or require a wet signature, or require the client to turn up at the office to ID them.
It can all add up to a less than wonderful experience, and that’s just for your client who isn’t even using that firm, let alone the client that is. As we all know, conveyancers are only able to work at the speed of the slowest in the transaction; if you have an incredibly slow conveyancer, for whatever reason, then you’re not going to move at anywhere like the speed that is required.
Let’s also be fully aware of where we currently are. The average time to complete a transaction is 22 weeks – that’s five and a half months – and of course, while the average means large numbers will be completing in less time, it also means that many people will be going beyond this.
Six/seven/eight months plus to complete a transaction is a crazy amount of time, not just for your client but also for your income levels and your pipeline of business. If you have to wait that long for your pipeline to turn, then you are likely to be suffering in terms of bringing in the money you need not just to survive, but also be profitable.
It can seem like such a small element of the whole transaction, but conveyancing is really the most important – sorry advisers – because without it, none of us gets to the end point we want.
It therefore makes perfect sense to, for want of a better phrase, ‘take back as much control as possible’ for this – to understand where to place your client so they’ll have the very best chance of completing, because the firm you recommend does this day-in/day-out, understands the finer points, has the system and technology to do things quickly, and is also available to you so you can use your influence if things are stalling.
Keith Young is managing director of Broker Conveyancing