IS UP FRONT INFORMATION THE SILVER BULLET FOR CONVEYANCING?

Many involved in the conveyancing market have suggested for a long time that upfront information will improve the conveyancing process. With time frames for completion of conveyancing transactions at an all-time high, it is undoubtedly the case that something needs to be done to speed up the conveyancing process.  But is up front information enough?

Few can argue against making documents available to a buyer’s conveyancer as early as possible in the conveyancing transaction.  If the buyer’s conveyancer can see the seller’s title at the point of offer and they can consider issues such as the planning history of the property and adoption of roads in the searches and look at information about the property supplied by the seller, this will improve the flow of a transaction.

But is this enough? I would argue that it is not.

We have seen the recent launch of the Digital Property Market Steering Group which includes organisations such as HMLR, CLC, the Law Society and UK Finance. The group advocates that information about a property is immediately available to all and that everything is ‘handled digitally.’ This is a laudable aim, but some reports of the launch event were, at best, lukewarm.

The Home Buying and Selling Group has just released a discussion paper to identify ways that the home buying and selling process can be improved.

So, there are a lot of highfliers in the conveyancing world vexed by the problem of how to improve the process.

When I qualified, the average time from instruction of a conveyancer to exchange was as little as 4 to 6 weeks. Today it is more than double that. Surely with the proliferation of ‘prop tech’ in the market, transaction times should have improved in the last 25 years?

So, what has gone wrong?  Conveyancing is in a perfect storm: experienced staff have left the industry altogether; the leasehold market being strangled with poor management companies and the horror of the Building Safety Act and lenders increasingly piling responsibility on conveyancers are just a few of the challenges facing the sector.

At PCS Legal we recognised the need for up front information years ago. We have offered a ‘Fast Move’ service for a long time. But here is the thing: clients do not want it. What we thought would be a run-away success has only had limited take up. Sellers and buyers generally do not want to engage (and pay for) conveyancers at an early stage.  Unless and until the government forces parties in a conveyancing transaction to produce and engage with up front information, things are unlikely to change. And there is no indication that the government has any appetite to introduce such changes any time soon.

So up front information is clearly important – but alone, it is not the silver bullet and many other aspects of our market need to change to bring about meaningful improvement to conveyancing transaction times. And perhaps HMLR taking substantially less than 1.5 years to complete new build and leasehold registrations would also help.

Stuart Forsdike, Founder, and Senior Partner of PCS Legal