Previously in the How much does it really cost series of articles, we talked about the costs involved simply looking for a house. This time around, we focus on the cost of Conveyancing.
What is conveyancing?
Without going into too much detail, conveyancing involves all the legal ins and outs required for passing property from one party to the other. You can do it yourself, but as a first time buyer I thought better of it.
How much does it cost?
This is the interesting part. It costs a lot. In my opinion, our conveyancers didn’t seem to do a great deal, failed to return phone calls and emails on more than four occasions and to be honest didn’t really help us accomplish anything. They told us we were due to exchange contracts on two occasions, neither of which were successful, but both times we had to call them to find out, they didn’t bother to tell us. Because we were told we were going to exchange and complete at a much earlier date, our conveyancing firm have had our deposit in their account, gaining interest for at least a month. Roughly about £150.00 in our high interest account. So lets count that.
£150.00
Next up are the searches. The house I am buying is 4 years old, so I never imagined there was going to be any hidden suprises and I was right. The biggest suprise that the searches showed up is that there’s a slim chance I may have to pay monies towards the local parish. I sure the searches show up lots of things for others house buyers, but I don’t honestly believe it costs this much to produce them.
Land Registration Fee - £150.00
Local Search Fee - £130.00
Drainage Search Fee - £42.30
Environmental Search Fee - £41.95
Coal/Other Search Fee - £17.63
Here comes the biggie, the cost of their services was xxx.xx. I saw my solicitor once, at which time he virtually read out the searches to me, not really giving any extra in sight or advice and told me we would be exchanging contracts in the coming week. He emailed me a couple of times, but I never got to speak to him on the phone. He potentially should have replied to two of my emails and returned two phone calls, but this didn’t happen. So other than that, he payed in my cheque and placed the order for the searches. They’re handling the transfer of the money, but the seller is using the same legal firm, so I’m sure that’s not all that difficult.
£536.75
Total
This gives us a total cost of £1068.63, albeit including money I would have gained through interest had I been able to hold onto my deposit longer.
