Conveyancing delays are not mysterious and they are not usually anybody’s fault. They are the same eight things in rotation, and a striking proportion of them could have been identified before the property ever went on the market.
The Eight
1. Planning compliance — by a distance the most common. An extension, attic or garage conversion with no certificate. Frequently the work was done perfectly well and simply never documented, or done by a previous owner who left nothing behind. Resolving it means engaging a professional to certify and, depending on what was built, possibly a retention application with its own timeline. 2. Title — unregistered property, an incomplete chain of deeds, or a first registration never completed after the last purchase. 3. The lender — loan conditions requiring third parties, and internal timelines for releasing funds that nobody can compress. 4. The chain — you close when the slowest party closes, and nothing your solicitor does affects a party three links away. 5. Estates, where a grant of representation has to issue before conveyancing can properly begin. 6. The Building Energy Rating, not obtained. 7. Local Property Tax or management company charges not up to date. 8. Boundaries, access and septic tanks in rural sales.
Why It Looks Like Nothing Is Happening — and What You Can Do
The stage between contracts issuing and contracts exchanging is when the substantive work happens: title investigated, requisitions raised and answered, searches carried out, compliance checked, lender conditions satisfied. Almost none of it is visible from outside, and much of it depends on other people — the other solicitor, the lender, a local authority, an engineer who did work fifteen years ago. That said, silence is not the same as progress, and a reasonable expectation is to know what is outstanding and who is being waited on. Any solicitor should be able to tell you that in a sentence. What you can actually do: as a seller, nearly everything, because most delay is caused by information the seller does not yet have — assemble title, planning certificates, the Building Energy Rating and the Local Property Tax position before you go to market. As a buyer, book the survey early, move from approval in principle to a formal loan offer as fast as you can, and deal with loan conditions the week the offer issues rather than the week of closing. Both sides: answer your own solicitor quickly, because a question sitting in your inbox for five days is five days of the transaction gone. And on dates — an ambitious closing date everybody privately knows is unrealistic causes far more difficulty than a slightly later one that holds.
Stuck, and Nobody Will Tell You Why?
You are entitled to know what is outstanding and who is being waited on. If that answer is not forthcoming, that itself is worth acting on.
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