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 Legal ease from Complete guide to Homebuying March 2003 Each month Complete guide to Homebuying offers advice on an aspect of the conveyancing process. This month: the legal process However desperate you are to move house, however much you want to sort out your mortgage and book the removal van, nothing can really start to happen until you have instructed a solicitor or conveyancer. This is usually done after you have found a home to buy and had your offer accepted. "Before then, unless you have specific questions about the process, there's really not much point," says Nick Mundy, senior partner at law firm Mundy's. When you first make contact with a solicitor you should ask for a quote for the legal work. As well as telling you how much they charge for their own time, they will be able to give you an idea of the total cost of disbursements - these include stamp duty and fees for various searches. "These fees can make a huge difference to the economics of the deal," says Mundy. With this in mind it is important to make sure you have allotted enough cash to the legal process. Before you choose a lender it's a good idea to check they are on your lender's panel. "this helps speed up the mortgage process," says Imelda Carney, lending services solicitor at Yorkshire Building Society. It is also cheaper. "If the conveyancer is not on the lender's panel, then the lender will have to ask another legal adviser to deal with the mortgage and these costs will also have to be met by the buyer," she says. Fortunately it is unusual for a conveyancer not to be accepted by a lender. If the solicitor is acceptable to your lender and you are happy with the price the process can begin. Buyers need to give details of their chosen lender and the estate agent they are buying through. Those who are selling a house need to provide details of their existing lender so the solicitor can track down the deeds to their current home. "The first thing we do on a purchase is apply to the seller's solicitor for the draft contract," says Mundy. This lays out the terms of the sale as the seller sees it. If you're selling a property your solicitor will prepare this contract and send you a fixture and fittings form where you can indicate what items will be sold with the house. The Local Authority and water searches will be instructed at around this time, together with any other searches your lender requests. Once the solicitor has received the survey results and the draft contract they will check that all is well with the sale. If there is anything unusual in the contract that may affect you, or your lender, they will negotiate changes with the seller's solicitor. When the contracts satisfy both parties a date can be arranged for the exchange, this is the date when you sign the contract and become legally obliged to go through with the deal. At the same time the seller becomes obliged to sell you the property, or provide you with compensation if they decide to pull out. There will usually be around two weeks between this date and the completion date - the day when you finally own the property and receive the keys. During this time your solicitor will carry out a bankruptcy search to assure the lender you are solvent and a Land Registry search to confirm the property hasn't changed hands. With these searches done, the sale can be completed. The time when the completion date is decided varies. "Where there are only a couple of people involved in the chain this can be discussed early on," says Colin Baum, managing director of online conveyancing firm Easier2move. "If there are say three or four people involved there's no point discussing it then." In these cases, says Baum, the completion date will be discussed four or five weeks into the process. The length of the chain is also likely to affect how long the legal process takes as more transactions give scope for more hold ups. "The normal reason for delay is lenders not getting their act together and sending through the offer," says Nick Mundy. "The other is waiting for Local Authority searches." If, however, everything goes according to plan, the process could be complete in six to eight weeks. 
MARCH MORTGAGE FEATURES
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