FTB - Solicitor Fees

kingstreet

There you go. Hidden down the bottom, fees which will be payable in pretty much every case;-

If you are selling or purchasing with a mortgage this will incur an additional charge of £95.00 plus Vat for the further work involved in acting for your lender and meeting their requirements.

Your Lawyer will complete the Stamp Duty Land Transaction (SDLT) Return Form on your behalf and submit it to Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and this will incur an additional charge of £75.00 plus Vat.

£204 of extra fees which should be in the headline rate, IMHO.

brokensocialsteve

kingstreet wrote: »

There you go. Hidden down the bottom, fees which will be payable in pretty much every case;-


£204 of extra fees which should be in the headline rate, IMHO.

Yeah I agree and they did include that in the quote over the phone so that was fair enough.

Could you recommend a reasonably priced Solicitor? Preferably in the Manchester area if possible (although Simply Conveyancing are in Daventry I think, probably a call centre)

kingstreet

I suggest you ask friends and relatives in your chosen area for a recommendation. I order three quotes for my clients from three firms in our area who I know only charge the headline fee and offer good service at a fair price.

Chasing the cheapest and using conveyancing warehouses on a purchase would be a mistake IMHO.

Hit the phone, talk to the people you will deal with and get a feel for hos they work.

Yorkie1

kingstreet wrote: »

There you go. Hidden down the bottom, fees which will be payable in pretty much every case;-


£204 of extra fees which should be in the headline rate, IMHO.

Plus the storage fee - I've not seen that included separately in a quote before.

Richard_Webster

and insurance to protect against liability for Chancel Repairs.

If, as is most likely you will not complete your purchase until after 13th October, it is 99.5% certain this will not be needed as in 99.5% of cases there will be no liability for you if you buy after that date!

The figure of 99.5% is probably too low as it is very very unlikely indeed that these rights will already be registered against the title to the property you are buying or that they will registered in the next few weeks!

As Kingstreet has suggested, phone some local solicitors and ask for their figures - ask if they do charge extra for the SDLT for, acting for lender and storage fee.

TBagpuss

The storage fee is unusual - in my experience this is part of the solicitors overheads (although it is common to make a charge to retrieve the file if you want it at a later stage)
The ID verification won't be charged by every solicitor - I assume these are using a verification service as opposed to checking your ID manually. the BACS charge may vary a little, too - I think £39+VAT is on the high side of average but you may find that all the lawyers in your areas charge the same.

The stamp duty, searches etc will be the same whoever carries out the work.

I second the recommendation to get quotes from several local solicitors.

If you are not clear on what is included in the estimate, don't be afraid to ask questions to clarify (and how helpful they are in responding may be quite helpful to you - if they are slow or reluctant to respond that m may not bode well for getting prompt answers if you have further questions during the process

Clitheroekid

I am completely fed up with this sort of weasel pricing.

The first point to make is the distinction between fees and disbursements. Fees are destined for the solicitor's pocket, disbursements should simply be reimbursement for money he's laid out.

So if he carries out a Land Registry search it will cost him £3.00. If he carries out a local search it might cost him £85.60. In either case your bill should show a disbursement of £3.00 / £85.60 in the `disbursements' column.

In other words a solicitor should not make any profit on disbursements.

However, what a lot of volume conveyancers are doing is disguising fees as disbursements. A classic example is the `bank transfer charge'. In the above case it says:

If balance of funds is to be paid by electronic bank transfer an additional charge of £39.00 plus Vat will be incurred.

Now the average punter might read that as meaning that's what the bank charges the solicitor, so that it would be the same with any conveyancer. Wrong! Banks do not charge VAT, so whenever you see such a charge it's the Solicitor who's making the charge - it's a handy £39 extra fee on top of the basic fee.

To be fair this lot aren't actually saying it's a disbursement, but some firms do. However, it should be included in the basic fee, as these days all completion funds are transferred electronically, so to pretend it's an optional extra is utter rubbish - you couldn't complete without it!

Let's look at some of the other charges.

Search Pack £311.20. I have to say that this sounds very expensive, and it's approximately twice what my clients are paying for the stated set of searches. I would be inclined to ask for a breakdown of this figure, as I'm damn sure at least £100 could be shaved off by obtaining searches from a better value provider.

Whether the conveyancers are deriving some sort of benefit from obtaining the searches from this particular provider I couldn't say, but I can't understand why they are so expensive.

It's also quite likely that some of these searches would be completely unnecessary. This is where local knowledge comes in useful. I know which searches to use locally, but a conveyancing factory 200 miles away knows nothing of the area and just orders the whole lot, even if they're a waste of time and money.

If the property is Leasehold / Shared Ownership this will incur an additional charge of £150.00 plus Vat for the further work involved.

This can be reasonable if it's a flat, as they are more difficult to deal with than a house. But if it's a long leasehold house there's very little additional work, so a nice £150 bonus for the solicitor.

Your Lawyer will complete the Stamp Duty Land Transaction (SDLT) Return Form on your behalf and submit it to Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and this will incur an additional charge of £75.00 plus Vat.

Another common `add-on'. There's nothing to stop a buyer doing this for themselves, they aren't that difficult to fill in, and even if it takes half an hour most people would consider £150 an hour is a pretty good rate of pay! But note there's no option - "Your Lawyer will complete the ... Form". So if it's compulsory why isn't this fee included in the basic fee? Could it be because they want to attract punters with an artificially low basic fee? Surely not!

Following completion your file has to be stored for up to 12 years and therefore an additional charge of £29.00 plus Vat will be incurred to cover the cost of storing and archiving your files and documents associated with your case.

I must admit I've not seen this one before - very inventive! However, it's part of a solicitor's obligation to a client to store their papers, and the cost should be part of their overheads. I would never dream of doing this, and I don't think most of my colleagues would, either. Again, it seems to me that it's just a sneaky way of bumping up the headline fee.

But the one thing that really pi**es me off about this sort of pricing is that it diverts work away from straightforward firms who will provide an honest all-in quotation. Because that quotation includes all these compulsory `extras' it initially looks more than the headline price quoted by firms like this, and the firm may therefore lose the job.

It's not until the poor punter gets their completion statement that they realise it would have cost them less with the local firm.

And by that time it's too late.

ACG

I use the same solicitor for most of my clients. Shes not the cheapest but shes by no means expensive. Having dealt with some right pains in the !!! solicitors in the past i do try to use the one i know where possible.

Her charges are:
Legal Fees £360.00

+ VAT £72.99
Telegraphic Transfer fee £24.00
SDLT fee £48.00
Local Search £75.00
Drainage Search £20.00
Coal search £39.00
Land Registry fee £190
Official Search £4.00
Bankruptcy Search £2.00 per person
Bank Transfer fee £12.00
Plus stamp duty £xxxxx

Hopefully that helps.

Clitheroekid

Her charges are:
Legal Fees £360.00

+ VAT £72.99

Telegraphic Transfer fee £24.00
SDLT fee £48.00
Bank Transfer fee £12.00

This is another example of what I was talking about before.

The `Telegraphic Transfer fee' is an additional charge, not a payment she's making on behalf of the client. The real fee is therefore up to £380.00 + VAT.

The `SDLT fee' is also an additional charge, not a payment she's making on behalf of the client. The real fee is therefore increased again to £420.00 + VAT.

And what's the `Bank Transfer fee'? Surely that's already covered by the `Telegraphic Transfer fee'. Another £10 + VAT, so her true charges are £430 + VAT and disbursements, but this doesn't sound quite as attractive as £360, does it.

ACG

Does it matter if the fees are separated or included in one lump sum? So long as the price at the outset is the price at the end the client is capable of adding up the total cost to make a comparison.

Also some of those fees you rolled up do not include VAT, hence why they are separate to the vatable figure at the start.

Im not here to defend the solicitors fees. As far as im concerned i would prefer my clients to use her as she is worth her wait in gold, they are by no means tied into using her though. To me is makes no difference, thats the cost go with it or dont. There is a breakdown of all the fees so the client can see exaclty where the money is going.