When to instruct a conveyancing solicitor

Posted by admin on April 6, 2012 under Conveyancing Advice | Comments are off for this article

The housing market may have hit something of a slump in recent years but if you are one of the small number of potential homebuyers who registered with estate agents earlier this year then you are the living proof that some green shoots of recovery are beginning to appear. For those who have taken a step towards getting on to, or moving up, the housing ladder, and who are currently house hunting, or even just thinking about it, the question of when to instruct conveyancing solicitors is a key one. Although it is important that the transaction has the proper guidance from the start, of course you don’t want to end up paying a fortune in legal fees for unnecessary time spent on your house sale or purchase by the conveyancing solicitor.

 

Not all sales and purchases that start out with the best intentions actually make it to the finish line but the advisors still need to be paid and if you have started out instructing your conveyancing solicitors early on and then the purchase or sale falls through, you’re likely to be left with a fairly hefty bill and nothing to show for it.

 

On the other side of the coin, if you wait too long to instruct conveyancing solicitors, and you want the sale or purchase to go through quickly, then you may find that there is simply not enough time to do everything that needs to be done. These kinds of transactions, while often not complicated, do have a number of parts to them and things like searches can take some time to complete. If you have little or no experience of a house sale or purchase you may have unrealistic expectations of the timetable you can keep to and if you leave it too late to instruct a conveyancing solicitor, even the most efficient lawyer will be unlikely to be able to usher your transaction through in time. So, it is always necessary to instruct a solicitor in good time.

 

There are a couple of easy solutions to the costs issue of instructing conveyancing solicitors early. The first is to choose a firm of solicitors that offers ‘no move no fee’ conveyancing. As you might expect, this kind of deal means that the fees only become payable once the transaction is actually signed and sealed. The other option is simply to find conveyancing solicitors who don’t charge in advance so that you will only be presented with a bill once the work has been carried out.