Buyers occasionally feel their own solicitor is the obstacle — insisting on a document when everyone else is ready to close. The explanation is almost always the undertaking, and it is worth understanding, because it also explains why that solicitor is protecting you.
Acting for You and for the Bank
Where a purchase is mortgage-funded, the buyer’s solicitor normally also acts for the lender. That is standard practice in Ireland rather than a conflict: the lender needs title investigated on its behalf, its security ensured and its charge registered, and it uses your solicitor rather than instructing a second firm at your expense. The interests are largely aligned — you and the bank both want good title and valid security — and where they diverge, your solicitor must tell you and may have to stop acting for one of you. In practice that is rare, and the arrangement saves buyers considerable money. What it creates is the undertaking: a personal, binding promise from the solicitor to the lender, typically that the title is good and marketable, that the charge will be validly created and registered, and that the funds will be used only as intended. It is given by the individual solicitor, enforceable against them personally, and treated with great seriousness by the profession and the courts. So a solicitor who closes without satisfying a requirement has not merely taken a commercial risk on your behalf — they have exposed themselves personally. No amount of urgency changes that calculation, and you would not want a solicitor for whom it did.
Approval in Principle Is Not a Mortgage
Approval in principle is an indication of what a lender might lend based on information you supplied. It is not a commitment. A formal loan offer is an offer of a specific loan, on specific terms, for a specific property, subject to conditions that must be satisfied before drawdown. The gap between the two is where a great many transactions come unstuck, because the buyer believes they have a mortgage and the seller believes they have a funded buyer. Do not exchange contracts on approval in principle — it puts your deposit at real risk, and it is one of the few genuinely avoidable disasters in conveyancing. Then the conditions themselves, which are among the commonest reasons a closing date moves: life assurance and home insurance in place, a valuation, proof of the balance of the purchase money, and sometimes something specific to the property — planning compliance, a septic tank certificate, works to be completed. Each takes time, several depend on third parties, and lenders have their own internal timelines for releasing funds that nobody can compress. Deal with conditions the week the offer issues, not the week of closing. Finally, after closing your deeds are generally held by or for the lender until the mortgage is redeemed — worth remembering, because retrieving them is the first step when you eventually sell or switch lender.
Loan Offer Issued?
Send it through early. The conditions are what set the timetable, and the ones that depend on third parties are the ones worth starting immediately rather than in the closing week.
Call 01 5827148