Estate Agents and Recommendations to use Conveyancing Solicitors

In this article David Lawrenson of LettingFocus.com rages against estate agents who recommend incompetent solicitors.

When I’m not helping out think tanks* to write reports on the private rented sector and when I’m not advising organisations and landlords about the PRS, I get to do some “landlord work” on my own portfolio! (* This is not a joke, this aspect of my work gets busier each month as more political parties and other interested parties continually wish to put their proverbial oar in and have to hire researchers who then have to ask me how the private rental sector works! Perhaps I should start charging my normal consultancy fees)

Of course, being a landlord does involve me buying property from time to time.

Now, the process of buying property never runs smoothly, even for one who has done it umpteen times.

Tortuous Processes

It’s always tortuous – which is natural really as you have a whole host of interested parties who can all easily manage to make things a lot harder than they need to be – the house seller, the mortgage lender, their estate agent and their solicitor. I could go on. (It is a whole bunch worse and a lot more stressful for those buying new build and especially new build via a sourcer or property club!)

When buying as a landlord to let out a property, the hassles and delays and general stupidity of others should rather wash over you, because you should be moving only as fast or as slow as the vendor wishes. (This should give you a great advantage over other buyers when you negotiated on the price with the vendor).

But when you are buying for yourself to live in and you are tied to tight timescales – as I am at the moment, the stupidity of others can rather rankle.

Estate Agents Recommending Conveyancers

Once particular boondoggle of mine is estate agents who recommend their clients use their friendly local solicitor or conveyancer, even when that solicitor is patently not very good.

For a start I’ve never believed all the guff that a local solicitor’s local knowledge counts for much in these online days.

But I’m not against people making recommendations, as long as they are good ones. I know the estate agents probably get a small commission from them – and that’s fine. At LettingFocus we also earn some income from some of the suppliers on our landlords’ resources page. (Nothing wrong with that, though we endeavour to put up only good suppliers on there, often ones we have used ourselves).

The trouble is that estate agents’ preferred conveyancing solicitors often seem expensive to me (it could be the effect of all that commission paid to agents!) but they are often are not very good either.

The estate agents usually recommend the musty high street variant of the conveyancer species – all old furniture and desks piled high with client files. They are often small firms too – which too often means that when the lead solicitor goes sick / is on holiday, the conveyancing file just sits there and nothing progresses and no one else in the firm can find out what the hell is happening.

For the property I am buying right now, the estate agent recommended their client, the vendor, used their local firm of solicitor for their linked purchase.

This was despite the fact that their mortgage lender, HSBC, insisted on using its own solicitor*. So, they have basically duplicated work and no doubt added cost and certainly delay. (*HSBC have since abandoned this policy because according to the specialist press, it often caused delayed deals and an increased rate of failures on transactions).

Poor Service

The service of the other side’s high street solicitor has also been woeful and advice to their client has looked wrong to us. So bad has it been, in fact, that we have now given up on the transaction completely.

I am not saying all high street solicitors recommended by your local estate agents are all bad. Some are no doubt rather good – and I’m generally the kind of guy who likes the small player. (I’ll happily pay 10% more to Mssrs. Patel, Osman and Smith at the local shop so that Mr. Tesco doesn’t get my business.)

But I have always found the new brand of good E conveyancing solicitors to be far more effective. With the whole transaction online, anyone at my E conveyancer can see what the state of the transaction is – and so can I, via a special log in.

Too many of the musty high street solicitors don’t seem to be able to offer this modern service.

But be careful. There are some very poor E conveyancers out there. So look on line and read the reviews first! And please, always think long and hard about accepting an estate agents’ recommendation of a conveyancer. For them, do your research online and elsewhere and get honest recommendations from past clients.

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