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Residential conveyancing checks that you need to have carried out when buying a property.
Having just gone through the whole residential conveyancing process in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, I thought it would be useful to write an article that could answer some of the questions that I had when going through this daunting process.
Residential conveyancing is legal speak for the process involved when legally transferring ownership of a property from a seller to a buyer.
The process itself involves a number of checks to ensure you are aware of the local environment, what negative things the land may have been used for and exactly what you are being sold.
Lets go through the process in stages:
You have seen the perfect property, you have been to see the mortgage adviser and have been told that they can provide the money that you need so you make an offer on the house and the seller accepts. Gazumping apart the process starts in earnest.
You should first go to a local solicitor that you either know or have heard are good (I was lucky enough to have a recommendation). If you have none of this to go on ring up three solicitors in your local area and ask them to give you a quote for conveyancing the property you want to buy. You can go on price but I would recommend going with the person that you connect with most as you will be dealing with them for the entirety of the process.
What will then happen is that the sellers solicitor will start writing up a contract on what you are actually getting for the money.
The contract details will include selling price, the boundaries, what fixtures and fittings are included (for example wood burning stove, cooker etc if you are buying land you may have agreed a tractor as part of the sale!), legal restrictions or rights on the property, planning restrictions, a description of the services to the property (septic tank or electricity), and finally completion date for the purchase.
While all of this is going on your solicitor will be making a number of checks to see if there is anything that might effect your decision on purchasing the property.
The checks can be broken down into environmental search, local authority search, chancel repair search,and if in a mining area, a mining search.
The environmental search lets you know if the ground is prone to flooding, has issues with Radon Gas, has had mining in the area, is listed as contaminated land (landfill nearby, fuel stations or waste treatment sites)
The Local Authority search will let you know if there are any pending planning applications that might effect the land that you are looking to buy. You can go into the local planning office yourself to have a look at plans in the local area.
The chancel repair search is to find out whether you have to pay the local church a set amount of money towards the repair of their chancel. This will soon be easier to check as churches have to register their chancel charge in the next few years or lose the right to claim the fee. Their is chancel insurance that you can take out to cover the eventuality of this but a good solicitor should sort this out for you.
If the environmental search, flags that their is mining in the area a further mining search can be carried out to see if the mines would have an effect on the property that you own.
What then comes if the buyer and seller are happy with the contract that both solicitors have prepared is an exchange of contracts which then makes the exchange legally binding. At this point both parties have legal recourse should the other person pull out of the contract.
What then happens is that the solicitors will then make sure everything is ready for the completion of the conveyancing process. This will include them ensuring that their are enough funds, check of the mortgage documents (if any), do a final land registry check, ensure that all things that have been agreed in the contract are carried out,ensure that all legal documents are completed to transfer ownership. This is then followed by the final transfer of the total funds and receipt of the legal documents that prove ownership. You then need to pay the solicitors fees and register the ownership of the land with the land registry.
The final cost that you will have to pay is the stamp duty on the property which when this article was written was 0% for properties purchased below the price of £125,000, 1% for properties between £125,001 and £250,000 unless you are a first time buyer when you don’t have to pay any stamp duty. This price then increases by 1% every time you double the purchase amount.
You may come across other elements that are different within the purchase of your property, for us the lady that we bought the property off said that she would take the property of the market if we could show her solicitor that we had the funding for the purchase. In our case this was the benefit of using a solicitor because they could also offer notarial services (legally confirm that a particular document is as stated).
There are a number of Government sites that clearly take you through this process and our solicitor in Salisbury was very supportive all of the way through the process.
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