How to speed up buying a house
How to speed up buying a house | The Spectator
By #Ed Mead 19/04/23
Everyone has a story about the stress of moving house. For those buying a new home, the process of exchanging contracts is perhaps even more nerve-racking than loading their worldly possessions into the back of a van.
When I started in the property game in the late 1970s, buying a property – that’s when you pay your 10 per cent deposit and your sale becomes irrevocable, not when your agent says ‘well done, your offer has been accepted’ – took roughly eight weeks. It now takes over 20, which is absurd. This extra time contributes the lion’s share of stress and seems to be getting worse.
There are roughly half as many solicitors doing conveyancing now as there were in 2005
Sure, there are roughly half as many solicitors doing conveyancing now as there were in 2005, but it’s still tough to explain the extra delay, especially given the advent of email and digital signatures, among other advances.
Many solicitors do things in their own way and are slow to change, plus
conveyancing has always been viewed as towards the bottom of the legal food chain. There’s also a preponderance of huge call centre-style firms handling too many files to sustainably keep an eye on them. What’s more, many estate agents view promoting legal services as a vital source of income. In my day having a good solicitor was a Godsend – why on earth would you recommend a duffer? – but that logic seems to have been confounded by referral fees.
Given all the above it was interesting to hear from a friend who is looking to update the buying and selling process by adopting the process used at auction, where you actually exchange contracts at the fall of the gavel.
He suggested to buyers they’d stop showing a property if they agreed to stump up £275 to pay for searches, which are used to find out information about a property; for instance, are there any local development plans that might affect your purchase? The agent also investigated things like drainage and water as well as flood risk.
These searches are often applied for by your solicitor, so any buyer will have to pay for them anyway. Most solicitors have their own way of dealing with the acquisition of searches and very rarely is it immediate. Having the agent carry out this process is much quicker and it also means that, if a potential buyer loses interest, the agent is already aware of any issues with the property.
The results were nothing short of staggering. Just over 25 per cent of my friend’s buyers agreed to pay for up-front searches – their purchases took an average of 79 days to keys in hand and not a single buyer pulled out. Those who chose not to stump up took an average of 120 days, with 42 per cent not going on to complete their purchases.
There is a clear and unambiguous correlation here between getting information upfront and the speed with which a deal can be concluded. No one is blaming conveyancing solicitors for slowing things down deliberately, but historically such information has been seen as only being available through your solicitor, who may or may not act with the speed you feel is needed.
Trying to hurry the process up can feel esoteric and many solicitors will question the veracity of the information provided, but think about something like insurance, which most of us now buy direct from a supplier rather than through a broker. It’s not the service that’s changed, it’s the path used to get there. Taking it into your own hands would, according to this sample, save you 41 days – that’s pretty much knocking a third off the time. Solicitors should see this as being a significant advantage – giving them one less thing to do.
It might be a relatively small sample, only around 200 people, but the upshot is unequivocal. Give a property buyer a sensible, targeted and useful way forward and you both shorten the process and waste fewer people’s time. As a stress reducer it’s the best I’ve seen in a long time and good on this agent for doing it – so how do we get everyone to try it out?