How do you want your conveyancing handled?

Lizzie29

I work for a busy Solicitors practice and have been tasked with trying to improve customer service.

We appear to be in another bubble where everyone wants to move house and need the services of our conveyancing department, a wonderful position to be in I know. However conveyancing has changed dramatically in recent years with more 'online conveyancing firms' entering the market forcing everyone to drop their prices and provide a fixed fee price for the service with a same day response. For this to be commercially viable for firms to continue providing we need to take on considerably more work than before with many Solicitors handling more than 50 conveyancing completions each per month.

So that's 50 sets of clients to keep up to speed on what is happening, 50 solicitors/conveyancers acting for the other side and 100 estate agents all needing updates on where things have progressed to and that is all before the actual conveyancing work begins.

So here's where I would love to know your thoughts....

Do you think online conveyancing update tools work? Or do they simply create more and more phone calls from all parties enquiring on what happens next? Opinion is divided here as to whether it will provide a better service to our clients and cut down on calls or create more.

What do our clients expect? I would really appreciate anyone's thoughts on the subject so that we can learn from it.

Thank you

marksoton

Lizzie29 wrote: »

What do our clients expect? I would really appreciate anyone's thoughts on the subject so that we can [STRIKE]learn[/STRIKE] profit from it.

If i thought my solicitor had 49 other clients to complete on in any given month i wouldn't be with them.

With that volume even simple things would be missed.

stator

I definitely would feel a lot better if I could see the status on a website.
I think if people could see that something was being done they would be less likely to phone up and keep badgering the solicitors.

The key is to providing the right information and a plain explanation so that people can understand what they are seeing.

So ideally you would have lots of little status monitors and as each portion of the work is completely it would have a little tick next to it to say it's been finished.
All the queries would need to be shown, with another little status to say whether they are outstanding, waiting for a reply, resolved, or waiting for customer feedback etc.
It would be good to see all the letters sent out on the customers behalf and the letters received too.

alchemist.1

marksoton wrote: »

If i thought my solicitor had 49 other clients to complete on in any given month i wouldn't be with them.

With that volume even simple things would be missed.

That would rule out most solicitors dealing with Conveyancing. Its a volume business.

marksoton

alchemist.1 wrote: »

That would rule out most solicitors dealing with Conveyancing. Its a volume business.

I quite agree. And that's why so many problem cases appear on here.

I'd never be under the impression i was one of only a couple of clients but those numbers? With the amount of information to be processed and legalities checked?

You just as well get a self help book.

fed_up_and_stressed

I bought recently and unfortunately was allocated a conveyancing farm team of solicitors by my lender (free legals) they had an online tracker.

It did remove the need to make less calls to the firm - however because they were so useless due to working such high volumes of cases and not being au fait with my case this generated far more work and contact from myself to them than the tracker saved.

I am now selling my prior home and made a conscious decision to use a small traditional firm in a local market town who knows me by name and who handle far far fewer conveyancing cases. I am happy to pay for service and I think it is still a valuable business model rather than the race to the bottom of volume conveyancing that firms seem to focus on.

I would say most clients would prefer their conveyancing done efficiently and in a way that doesn't jepordise the house sale / purchase as long as the price is relatively competative.

Make service your distinguishing feature.

Mrs_pbradley936

I would never use an online firm, only a solicitor and preferably one that will keep me up to date. Most buyers only ever one buy property at a time and often years or decades go by between sales hence they are not really clued up on the whole process.

If I was tasked with this I would put together a generic letter/email detail of what happens such as:

We take your instructions.
We conduct property searches.
We liaise with other solicitors within the chain of buying and selling.
We take care of the formalities of your mortgage provider.
If the property is a leasehold we take care of those formalities too.
We pay any disbursements incurred i.e estate agent fees, settlement of service charges etc.

I think if more people knew what was involved they would not be half as worried by it all.

Mrs_pbradley936

fed_up_and_stressed wrote: »

I bought recently and unfortunately was allocated a conveyancing farm team of solicitors by my lender (free legals) they had an online tracker.

It did remove the need to make less calls to the firm - however because they were so useless due to working such high volumes of cases and not being au fait with my case this generated far more work and contact from myself to them than the tracker saved.

I am now selling my prior home and made a conscious decision to use a small traditional firm in a local market town who knows me by name and who handle far far fewer conveyancing cases. I am happy to pay for service and I think it is still a valuable business model rather than the race to the bottom of volume conveyancing that firms seem to focus on.

I would say most clients would prefer their conveyancing done efficiently and in a way that doesn't jepordise the house sale / purchase as long as the price is relatively competative.

Make service your distinguishing feature.

I have to agree with you, the trouble is most people are so used to finding the cheapest deal with everything from mobile phones to car insurance that they assume everything is the same. They may not have bought property often enough to appreciate the difference between both types

marksoton

To look at it another way..

Would you employ the cheapest/busiest criminal solicitor if it meant potential prison tine...

Would you employ the cheapest/busiest civil solicitor to handle your divorce...

So why then do some entrust quite possibly the biggest purchase of their life to a cheap/busy solicitor..

Most good solicitor firms are based on what most successful businesses are. Turnover coupled with profit.

Conveyancing will never earn the profit but it does provide turnover which allows the other parts of the business to generate profit.

G_M

Post is more appropriate in the discussion forum.

And you've not clearly declared your interest:

What do our clients expect?

I'm guessing you are a conveyancer/solicitor or represent one or other, doing market research......

The forum is not here to assist with business market research. There are many professional commercial companes that will help you with this.

Benefit of the doubt, I'm not reporting this......... yet.

[Deleted User]

To be honest, I realise you may have posted with the best of intentions but would you really base business growth on the remarks of a few anonymous postees in a forum?

Its not very scientific, not reliable and well, we all have an axe to grind based on our experiences!

If you really want to help your business grow.., I am another one who'd suggest proper research is required.