Mortgage company legal team advice

Stargirl29

Right, need a bit of advice.

We're currently in the process of buying our new house. After several set backs, we finally got a mortgage offer last week. Now the company are saying that we must use one of their solicitors to carry on. We've already instructed a Conveyancer and he's already carried out the searches etc and is now waiting for the mortgage to go through before he carries on.

He's going to be contacting them tomorrow to discuss this, but I wondered if there is anything legal saying that we HAVE to use their choice of lawyer, surely if it's our potential house, and our money (eventually!) then we should have a say? Ours has been brilliant so far and kept us informed every step of the way and I really don't want to lose him if we don't have to.

Hope this made some kind of sense. I'm sure we'll find out more tomorrow but just wanted to vent and ask advice today before I implode!

Thanks in advance!

HouseBuyer77

All lenders require your solicitor to be on their panel. This is because the solicitor does some work for the lender too. It is possible in this instance that your conveyancer can get added to their panel. If not I think you could engage another solictor (who in on their panel) to do the bank's work who will then communicate with your solictor. But this won't be cheap and introduces extra delays to the process.

I'm slightly surprised you've already got past searches and such without determining if your conveyancer is on your lender's panel. This is normally something they check when you enquire about using them for conveyancy.

davidmcn

I suspect there's some confusion - they mean that they need to use a solicitor who is on their panel. You can use whatever solicitor you like (or no solicitor), but the norm is that "your" solicitor will be on your lender's panel and also able to represent them. I presume the issue here is that your solicitor isn't on the panel of your preferred lender - in which case your choice is (a) let the lender appoint their own solicitor, who will liaise with yours (you'll pay the additional legal costs for this), (b) sack your solicitor and appoint another one who is on the lender's panel, (c) wait while your solicitor jumps through whatever hoops are necessary in order to get appointed to the lender's panel (might not be possible), or (d) go with another lender who can use your solicitor.


Or possibly there's another reason why the lender wants to be separately represented.