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Practical guidance on residential conveyancing, buying, selling, and everything that happens in between, written in plain English, for home movers in England and Wales.
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Residential Conveyancing Basics
Residential conveyancing services cover everything needed to legally transfer ownership of a home — contract review, property searches, raising and answering enquiries, handling identity checks, coordinating with mortgage lenders, dealing with Stamp Duty and Land Registry, and managing the exchange and completion of the transaction.
Residential Conveyancing Basics
Conveyancing is full of terms that sound complicated but usually describe fairly simple ideas — this jargon buster explains the most common ones (exchange, completion, disbursements, title, searches and more) in plain English, so you can follow what your solicitor or conveyancer is telling you.
Residential Conveyancing Basics
Residential conveyancing fees usually run from around £500 to £1,500+ in legal fees alone, depending on your property value and whether you're buying, selling, or both — plus separate disbursements (searches, ID checks, bank transfer fees) and, for buyers, government fees like Stamp Duty and Land Registry charges.
Residential Conveyancing Basics
Property searches carried out during conveyancing typically include a local authority search, a water and drainage search, and an environmental search as standard, with extra searches such as mining, flood or coastal erosion added depending on where the property is. Together they're designed to uncover things about the property and area that a straightforward look around the house would never reveal.
Residential Conveyancing Basics
The Property Information Form (TA6) is a standard questionnaire sellers complete about their home, covering everything from boundaries and disputes to alterations and utilities. Getting the Property Information Form (TA6) right matters because your answers form part of the legal record of the sale, so honesty and thoroughness count for more than speed.
Residential Conveyancing Basics
Preparing for a smooth conveyancing experience as a buyer mostly comes down to getting your finances and paperwork ready early, responding to requests quickly, and understanding roughly what to expect at each stage. None of it removes all uncertainty from buying a home, but good preparation tends to reduce unnecessary delays.
Residential Conveyancing Basics
Residential conveyancing runs in a fairly predictable sequence — instruction, searches, mortgage offer, enquiries, exchange of contracts, and finally completion — and understanding each stage in advance makes the whole process feel far less mysterious. Most straightforward purchases move through these steps over roughly two to three months, though timings vary a lot from one transaction to the next.
Residential Conveyancing Basics
New-build conveyancing follows the same broad legal process as buying an existing property, but it comes with extra layers — tight developer deadlines, buying "off-plan" from drawings rather than a finished house, additional checks on warranties and management arrangements, and a legal process that often has to move faster than usual to satisfy the developer's own exchange timetable.
Residential Conveyancing Basics
The legal vs practical parts of residential conveyancing boil down to this: the legal side is what your solicitor or licensed conveyancer handles (contracts, title checks, searches, transferring ownership), while the practical side is everything else around the move itself (removals, meter readings, insurance, changing your address) — and knowing which is which stops you chasing the wrong person for the wrong thing.
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