Things seem a bit mad at solicitors in my town in Kent with many houses selling so fast at the moment, so I’m thinking of using an online conveyancer to get through the process in a reasonable time. Certainly not expecting to avoid stamp duty, just don’t want to be at the end of an enormous queue. Heard some bad things about going online but hoping for some recommendations.

NOT Conveyancing Direct in Glasgow.

😀

I had a mare with Simply Conveyancing a few years ago – it came to within a couple of minutes of the removal men driving off with all our stuff in their vans and back to their yard as they contrived to not complete in time (it turned out the person in charge of our case was on holiday on the completion day).

No sadly, we went with a nice local company who were beyond brilliant and we went from offer acceptance to moving in in under 8 weeks earlier this year(Jan – March), but my brother and 2 other close friends buying houses had offers accepted before us but use 3 different online conveyancers and 2/3 households are yet to be in and the other only moved in last week, most of the delays have been due to the online solicitors messing up form after form or taking 4 weeks to tell my brother than they had lost some of the information he had provided. It’s now looking like on of the couples the seller is getting cold feet as the exchange date has now been delayed 3 times…

We used juno.legal late 2017/early 2018 to sell and then shortly afterwards to buy and they were great to deal with. Nearly everything was done online save for a few docs needing sending back and forth for ID check and physical signatures.

Not sure what they charge now and/or if it varies but we paid £834 to sell and £1200 to buy.

We sold in March using DC Law and our conveyancer was very good…she was always on top of stuff and, when it came to issues, knew her stuff & dealt with it. Also impressed by the online portal for uploading docs and we’d get notifications if we needed to get something done to make sure the ball wasn’t in our court. I do think it does depends on the conveyancer within a firm you get though…we got lucky so past performance isnt always an indicator of future performance.

Having worked in the business for a while, and also bought a property, I would say just tread carefully. Some of them sound great, some sound terrible. As I understand it, they often consist of several junior staff working under one trained solicitor who signs off the work. In practice this can cause the issues outlined above with documents being asked for twice or not asked for at all etc.

Then again, I’ve heard of purchases almost derailed by local solicitors not keeping up to speed either.

I would not have thought than an online solicitor would be any faster or slower by default. The people I bought from had an online conveyancer, and they held the process up.

The solicitor I had for my purchase was a local guy in town and an absolute Rottweiler; exactly the sort of person you’d want to have representing you when dealing with your home and life savings.

So I have no strong feelings either way, but that’s who I put my trust and money in. There’s good options and bad options on both sides, but do be be picky, and don’t be pushed by estate agents/other salespeople.