Are there any plans to update the antiquated process of house buying in England?

FTB_Help

davidggreen said:

Thanks for your reply. I am not a first-time buyer so understand the buying process from my side. I have had similar experiences in particular with slow solicitors that poorly communicate each time. 

I don't necessarily think all solicitors work at a snails pace, mine has been nothing but fantastic and works and responds really quickly, although i am paying at the top end for conveyancing cost.

Most of the waiting around in my situation was my seller decided to go with the EAs conveyancer (premier property lawyers) and we all know how terribly slow they can be. Fortunately they dropped them and went for another solicitor from a larger law firm.

Another reason for the "slowness" was the waiting for the vendor to fill out forms and answer enquiries, so can't really blame the solicitors if they're slow at submitting stuff back.

Things like searches can take ages but thats more of a council issue.

Mortgage application takes a while too - lenders issue, out of solicitors hand.

Finding surveyor that is readily available was tough during the end of last year, again this is uncontrollable.

But in terms of conveyancing work, my solicitor has worked really fast, its all the other external factors that go into buying/ selling that is slow.

Mickey666

GDB2222 said:

davidmcn said:

JessJ23425 said:

I'm curious to the reasons why the onus isn't on the seller to get property information about their own house before going to market. Would this not speed up the actual transaction ten fold?

Buyer obtains a survey and searches for their property through a conveyancer then it goes up for sale, once the chain forms it's then just enquiries? From doing a bit of googling it seems this is the case in some countries and it certainly helps.

Home Report in Scotland includes a survey (and seller's questionnaire) which certainly saves all the surprises we read about here arising from surveys weeks/months after offers are accepted. Searches come after offer, but everyone in Scotland uses the private search providers who don't have the same backlogs as the English councils.

Similar packs were tried in England, quite a while ago. It was unpopular. I suspect that this was because it increased the cost of advertising a property and estate agents thought it damaged their business. I suspect the reality was that it made it harder to get instructions but easier to guide a sale through to completion.

Yes, the HIP Home Information Packs.  Good intentions but they didn't last long.
I always thought it was a flawed idea from the outset because few buyers would be prepared to trust the contents and would therefore still need to verify everything for themselves.  This, I think, is at the heart of the issue.  Buying a house is a huge financial undertaking and it's only reasonable for buyers to want to check all manner of things - and that takes time.

If a buyer really didn't want to check anything and they had the money already in their account I dare say they could buy a house in an afternoon.  All it would require would be a sit down meeting with the seller and both sides' solicitors, draw up a binding contract of sale, sign it, transfer the money there and then and the job is done - new legal owner.  Two hours tops.  Like buying a car.  Solicitor would then send off the paperwork to LR to register the sale and in due course the new owner would be registered - no different to buying a car on the spot and sending off the notification details to DVLA.  But how many buyers would be prepared to do that?  Right, none!

Also, time is needed to organise chains of sales, so even when a sale has progressed to the point where exchange can happen it is sometime delayed because of timing issues elsewhere in the chain.  We all know chain-free sales typically happen faster.  It's in no one's interest to drag out house sales and yes it can be a frustrating process but I think that's just the way it is.  After all, which other countries have radically better processes than we do?

davidggreen

GDB2222 said:

The answer is simple. People shop around for the very cheapest solicitors to do the job. A typical bill for the legal work is £700-1000. The rest is disbursement, vat etc. That’s not enough for a fully qualified professional to do the work, so there’s usually one qualified person supervising lots of staff. There’s not enough money in it for staff to have any slack time, so every item of correspondence goes in a queue to be looked at later. And the work queue has to be kept full, or the work is running at a loss. 

I agree. When the agent is getting 5 times this for sticking the property on Rightmove. I had to do the viewings due to covid. I would happily pay more for a faster service, it certainly would reduce the stress involved.

davilown

As a seller, I'd be more than happy to pay for a homebuyers report and searches - I want to sell the house and this would decrease the period from offer to exchange.  It would also show me any potential issues that may come up and allow me to mitigate them.
If someone wants to sell, surely this way would show that they are serious enough to do so.

Malt_in_my_hipflask

The conveyancing process has been mapped by multiple Legal IT suppliers for all UK jurisdictions. When selecting a solicitor, ask them which case management software they have implemented and how much efficiency it has brought them. If they don't have a case management system, then perhaps you should wonder why not.

Thrugelmir

davidggreen said:

GDB2222 said:

The answer is simple. People shop around for the very cheapest solicitors to do the job. A typical bill for the legal work is £700-1000. The rest is disbursement, vat etc. That’s not enough for a fully qualified professional to do the work, so there’s usually one qualified person supervising lots of staff. There’s not enough money in it for staff to have any slack time, so every item of correspondence goes in a queue to be looked at later. And the work queue has to be kept full, or the work is running at a loss. 

 I would happily pay more for a faster service, it certainly would reduce the stress involved.

How much extra? What you'll be paying for is for people to be doing nothing productive a lot of the time. Hourly charge out rates are high. 

Having said that you've no control over the parties involved in the transaction. They might have a different agenda to you. Part of which will be a different timescale. 

greatcrested

JessJ23425 said:

I'm curious to the reasons why the onus isn't on the seller to get property information about their own house before going to market. Would this not speed up the actual transaction ten fold?

Buyer obtains a survey and searches for their property through a conveyancer then it goes up for sale, once the chain forms it's then just enquiries? From doing a bit of googling it seems this is the case in some countries and it certainly helps.

Have a read of wikipedia here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Information_Pack

theartfullodger

I'd rather this antiquated incompetent murdering government was updated sooner.   After how they've "managed" Brex**** & Covid we need others in charge for the future: House selling process yes that should be addressed, but let's fix the big one 1st.

Best wishes to all

BikingBud

Let's get away from caveat emptor and place some responsibility and liability on the seller for honesty and openness.
Mistrust only comes in because there is so much conniving. If it was all above board and very clearly written what was being sold and what the reasonable consideration was the process would be much simpler and easier to navigate and keep on track. 
It's worked for cars so why not houses?
My opinion; too much emotion and natural human greed and not enough rational thought, this board is full of it.

@theartfullodger "murdering", that's little strong on a house buying discussion! 

PS- Why do we pay solicitors so much for it, what would happen if we paid semi-skilled personnel and we removed a lot of the ambiguity by placing a clear process with accountabilities. 

fewcloudy

greatcrested said:

JessJ23425 said:

I'm curious to the reasons why the onus isn't on the seller to get property information about their own house before going to market. Would this not speed up the actual transaction ten fold?

Buyer obtains a survey and searches for their property through a conveyancer then it goes up for sale, once the chain forms it's then just enquiries? From doing a bit of googling it seems this is the case in some countries and it certainly helps.

Have a read of wikipedia here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Information_Pack

Thanks for the link. The first line under Reception was pretty much the main reason IMO. The (surveyors) had a right good moan about it up here in Scotland too. They were quite happy surveying the same house for different interested buyers, and feared that they would lose a lot of surveying business because of Home Reports.

If you lived in Edinburgh during the years of 10-20% house price increase per year, you could have 20+ Notes of Interest made on a property by potential buyers, easily, most of them materialising into a firm offer at closing date.
Many of them required a survey/valuation of the property to be done, so that they knew what the surveyor declared the house to be worth, and how it fitted in with the mortgage they could get. But only one of them could be the successful purchaser. Surveyors were loving life, easy money.

Asked to explain the different levels of survey one could get, a surveyor pal used to joke that the cheap basic survey was 'dropping down into 2nd as they drove past the house"...