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Estate Agents & Conveyancers

- A Happy Relationship?

Estate Agents and Conveyancers are the two professional services most people rely on when moving home but what should we expect each one to do?

First things first estate agents and conveyancers generally do not get on. Conveyancers tend to think estate agents are pushy and get too much commission, whilst estate agents tend to think conveyancers are slow and unhelpful. This is not useful to you the home mover who is paying for the services of professionals who don't want to work together. So just how do you optimise the services of these two professionals who lets face it, have a reputation for charging a lot of money for what appears to be a lot of work.

Well first of all lets see what drives the two. Estate Agents work on commission and are targeted to push as many sales through as possible they are paid on exchange of contracts, if the sale falls through all their hard work is wasted. This is in contrast to a conveyancer who is pressured by their firm and the Law Society to act in the best interests of the client and not expose them to any legal or financial risks. If their is a problem with the transaction the conveyancer may advise the client to pull the plug on the transaction, how much would you trust your estate agent to do the same? Once exchange of contracts has taken place the estate agent is paid their commission. At this point some estate agents will lose interest in the transaction however a good one will continue to help for customer relations reasons (i.e. repeat business). A conveyancer is paid on completion however some of the most crucial work is completed after completion such as registering the property in your name. It is a common problem in the business that 'post completion work', as its known, is often left until the conveyancer gets round to it as pre completion work is the stuff that brings in more revenue and therefore is treated with a higher priority. Remember to keep chasing the conveyancer after completion until you see your name on the deeds.

Now with an understanding of what drives each of them you can utilise this to put pressure in the right places to push your transaction through. Conveyancers are not the quickest of people and can be dealing with 50 - 200 other files at the same time as yours. This sometimes means that they don't always chase documents as quickly as they should. An estate agent however won't usually be handling as many impeding sales and so has the additional time to chase things up. Another thing to bear in mind is restrictions in the law mean that a conveyancer can not actually speak to the person buying/selling your home directly and must go through their solicitor. So if the conveyancer is telling you they are awaiting a document from the seller and they aren't responding to their solicitor a quick call to the estate agent can be a direct route to spur the seller on. However please don't place too much pressure on the conveyancers through the estate agents. Constant calls from the estate agent could be dragging them away from actually dealing with your transaction. At the point of the conveyancers instruction most of the estate agents work will have been done so there's not much the conveyancer can help you with in regards to pushing the estate agents.

One thing to be careful with regarding estate agents is that as nice as they seem they are animals driven by money. They earn a tidy commission off of selling your home but can also supplement this commission by referring you to mortgage lenders, conveyancers and even insurance brokers. Although they may sometimes represent good deals be aware that they might not be the best deals available to you on the open market. It's no coincidence that one of the biggest conveyancing firms is owned by one of the biggest estate agent chains.