No wonder conveyancing is so slow

chineplate

benjus wrote: »

Don't see why the draft contract can't be emailed. In fact, there's no reason that a solicitor can't email the final contract to one or more of the parties for them to print out, sign and return the hard copy. This is commonly done when some parties are outside the UK.

That is exactly how it was done on a past sale of mine. The whole process still took an age though.

alchemist.1

The 7 days is essentially to balance the other 100+ conveyancing matters the individual is dealing with.

elverson

Yes - the solicitor will have other sales which are exchanging/completing sooner and will obviously work through things in that order!

benjus

If you want the solicitor's undivided attention you could always offer to pay them for time worked on your case at their standard hourly rate. Then I'm sure they'd be very happy to take your calls and chat for as long as you want.

kingstreet

davidmcn wrote: »

Why not? The final version may need to be a signed hard copy but other types of draft contract are routinely adjusted electronically these days.

Sorry, I had never heard of a draft contract being emailed and assumed there were audit trail reasons for this, so solicitors continued to use paper copies.

Is a pdf of the plan used?

happylucky

Almost everything can be scanned and emailed.... Contract signature does not even need to be wet/original! I queried this because I was really surprised, but no need whatsoever, scan was fine.

Only actual legal transfer docs need original signatures as these most be witnessed...apparently...but even those can be emailed and printed out before the wet signatures filled in and posted back.

I found this out selling a UK property from Oz. It all worked out fine, but I did brief my solicitor I wanted a super fast conveyancing process with everything done electronically and they explained this to the buyer's solicitor when we started the process.

The weakest link was my buyer. They and their solicitor bizarrely insisted on using post to communicate with one another (living in the same town and they could even have dropped stuff off manually). Total waste of time IMHO.

benjus

kingstreet wrote: »

Is a pdf of the plan used?

Think my solicitor used PDF. However, I don't think the format matters much. I guess Word is a potential data protection risk if (for example) a contract from a previous case had been used as a template and somehow details of that case had been left within the document (e.g. by enabling document revision control).

ThePants999

Thrugelmir wrote: »

If you haven't even got a mortgage offer then I doubt your vendor has asked their solicitor to do anything yet. Time costs money. No point in wasting money until matters are ready to proceed.

No offence, but I'm glad you're not my solicitor - doing everything in series is the easiest way to drag it out the longest. Minimising elapsed time requires parallelising as much as possible, and waiting for a mortgage offer before starting on the conveyancing would be a huge waste of time.

G_M wrote: »

* if you'd ended the question earlier ie "Anyone have any good tips?" I'd have said: Learn patience or this will drive you mad. Buying a property is always slower than you want, always slower than you expect, and unless you chill, it will drive your blood pressure through the roof

Sage advice as ever G_M... easier given than followed though

G_M wrote: »

* You say: "Mortgage and survey are in hand." What does that mean? Done? If not, there's no hurry and no point stressing.

* No - it's not "all about the solicitors really." That is just one area. There are many others that can, and will, slow things down.

I firmly predict that the solicitors' work is the critical path in my case, and while there are indeed other elements that could slow things down, I predict that they won't slow things down more than the solicitors.

AdrianC wrote: »

Seven days for the standard draft contract to be revised with the details of the new sale and sent through to your solicitor is neither here nor there on the timescale. This is nowhere near the critical path.

Before you're ready to sign that draft contract, you need to have your mortgage nailed down, you need to have read the survey report and agreed any issues arising from it with the vendor, and your solicitor needs to have sorted any issues arising from the returned searches.

If and when all that lot's done, THEN you can worry about how long the draft contract will take to reach him.

My solicitor won't begin the searches until she receives this initial documentation from the seller's solicitor. That's why it's on the critical path.

kingstreet wrote: »

You can kick and scream to get everything done double quick, but if one party in the chain doesn't want to complete until 1 April (for example because their early redemption penalty doesn't expire until 31 March) you aren't going to complete until then, at the earliest.

All (three) parties in the chain want to complete at the same time. The question is merely whether we'll be able to

elverson wrote: »

Yes - the solicitor will have other sales which are exchanging/completing sooner and will obviously work through things in that order!

You say "obviously", but it's not at all obvious to me.
- It's a bad idea productivity-wise to delay quick actions. If something arrives on your plate that would take less than two minutes (like, say, attaching some documents to an email), it's much better for your overall productivity to do it immediately rather than schedule it for later.
- Prioritising shouldn't be a simple matter of "cases that are closest to completion first", it should be "anything that's on a critical path first". By definition, you are adding delay when you sit on tasks that are on the critical path, and you are not when you sit on other tasks.

marksoton

ThePants999 wrote: »

and waiting for a mortgage offer before starting on the conveyancing would be a huge waste of time.

No, a waste of time is if there isn't a lender prepared to offer you the funds you require.And until you get a formal mortgage offer you don't know there is.

TBagpuss

The point you are missing is that pretty much all of the things the solicitor / conveyancer will be working on will be 'on the critical path' for the people concerned.
Cnveyancing is high volume work, most conveyancers will have developed ways pof woirking which are efficient, and it is pretty arrogant for you to assume that you know better than they do what will work most effectively for them in dealing with their own workload.

The contract documenation will need to be amended to reflect the change in buyer. It is not as simple as forwarding an exisiting document.

You can chose to instruct your solicitors to start the searches early if you want. It is potentially more expensive, but that is up to you. It sounds as though your solicitor is sensibly dealing with matters in an efficient way, and you have no reason to think your seller's solicuitor is any different.