My last blog looked at whether the Con­veyanc­ing process needs to change? 

In sum­ma­ry, I think it would be dif­fi­cult to rad­i­cal­ly change the over­all Con­veyanc­ing sys­tem but there are cer­tain­ly areas which could be tar­get­ed, par­tic­u­lar­ly around lease­hold prop­er­ties & Man­age­ment Companies.

One of the main frus­tra­tions involved with work­ing in Con­veyanc­ing are lease­hold prop­er­ties. First­ly, let make it clear I have noth­ing against lease­hold prop­er­ties per se, I live in one myself & think there a lot of pos­i­tives. How­ev­er, a large per­cent­age of lease­hold prop­er­ties will involve a Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny. Again, I have noth­ing against Man­age­ment Com­pa­nies per se. My Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny does an excel­lent job in main­tain­ing & run­ning my development.

How­ev­er, we are all aware of the gen­er­al stereo­types of Man­age­ment Com­pa­nies; expen­sive, slow, dif­fi­cult to con­tact. Sad­ly, this also mir­rors the Con­veyanc­ing inter­ac­tion as Man­age­ment Com­pa­nies charge a range of fees for pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion & con­duct­ing basic admin­is­tra­tion. The issue with this is;

a) There is no con­sis­ten­cy for the client – some client could pay less than £200.00 for a Man­age­ment Pack, should they wish to sell their apart­ment, whilst oth­ers could pay upwards of £400.00

b) There is no con­sis­ten­cy with the doc­u­men­ta­tion need­ed – when buy­ing a new build prop­er­ty, it is usu­al to have to serve notices on the rel­e­vant par­ties such as Free­hold­ers, Man­age­ment Com­pa­nies & Man­ag­ing Agents. Again, the fees vary con­sid­er­ably and annoy­ing­ly, so does the required doc­u­men­ta­tion. Some pro­vide a form but some don’t.

All of the above adds time & stress for all par­ties con­cerned; the buy­ers Solic­i­tor has to ask the ven­dors Solic­i­tor for the infor­ma­tion. The vendor’s Solic­i­tor in turn will have to request the rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion &/or documentation.

So my sug­ges­tions are sim­ple, stan­dard­ise & reg­u­larise the fees & doc­u­men­ta­tion paid to third par­ties involved with lease­hold prop­er­ties. It is in the inter­est of the con­sumer, to makes fees fair­er & pro­vi­sion of doc­u­men­ta­tion more effi­cient, which will undoubt­ed­ly ben­e­fit all!

To arrange a dis­cus­sion about Con­veyanc­ing or the home buy­ing process, please get in touch with Rick Bar­row on 01625 523988 or mail@​JBGass.​com