In This Guide
Apply for a mortgage
Buying at auction
Buying in Scotland
Conveyancing
1. Conveyancing
2. The conveyancing process
3. Exchange and completion
4. Costs
5. Choosing a solicitor
6. Complaining about solicitors
7. DIY conveyancing
Find and view
Negotiate
Plan your purchase
Success and failure
Surveys and valuations
To buy or not to buy
Conveyancing
Costs
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Solicitors don't go through years of training to earn a pittance. It costs a lot to hire a solicitor to do almost any sort of work for you and conveyancing is no exception. The costs of conveyancing work can be broken down into solicitors fees and disbursements:
A solicitor will charge you a basic fee for undertaking the conveyancing
work associated with the purchase of your property. This covers
their time spent on taking your instruction, advising you, working
on the contract refinements, liasing with the other party's solicitor,
explaining the contract to you, obtaining your signature, exchanging
contracts, investigating the title deeds, and basically dealing
with all other related matters.
Expect to pay anything from £300 to in excess of £1000. Make sure that you fix the fee before they start work, if at all possible. This should be in the form of a written quotation and not an estimate. This should avoid a huge bill if there are unexpected complications. Some solicitors will link the level of the fee to the value of your home, which seems to be a common phenomenon in property transactions. Others will have a catch-all price which is set regardless of the property value. Conveyancing work on a leasehold property may be more expensive due to the additional work that is incurred as a result of dealing with the lease.
Disbursements are expenses that the solicitor incurs on your behalf
in association with the work they are performing for you.
These "disbursements" include:
- Local authority search fee
- Water authority search fee
- Land charges search fee
- Land registry fees
You will also have to pay stamp duty, which is set at a level fixed by the government, depending on the value of the property you are buying:
| Up to £60,000 | Nil |
| £60,001 - £250,000 | 1% |
| £250,001 - £500,000 | 3% |
| £500,001 + |
4% |
Apart from the search fees, which are often (but not always) paid
as you go along, you pay the main costs of the solicitor at the
same time that you forward them the deposit. This means that you
could easily end up with a bill of tens of thousands of pounds,
when your deposit, stamp duty, conveyancing fees and disbursement
costs are added together. Painful.
Here is an example of the total costs one lucky couple incurred
when they paid their solicitor (this does not include stamp duty)
:
| Solicitors basic fee search fee | £381.88 |
| Land registry fees | £200 |
| Local search | £95 |
| Water authority search | £35.25 |
| Personal search (incurred to speed up the process) | £141 |
| Land charges | £6 |
| Land registry search fee | £8 |
| Landlords costs (for information provided by the freeholder) | £23.50 |
| Total cost | £890.63 |
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