Last week the Land Registry issued account holder transaction statistics for November.
The figures showed that small conveyancers are continuing in business and not vanishing as has often been predicted.
Of the 4562 Land Registry account holders that made applications in November over 2000 of them conducted five applications or less.
This means 44% of firms were relatively small firms.
Whilst many lenders have reduced their panel sizes down to 3000 — 3500 firms, there are clearly many firms that have not pulled out of the market and are conducting conveyancing sales and purchases despite not being on some lender panels.
This is good news for consumers because it continues to give them choice and creates a competitive market.
Unfortunately for these 2000 smaller conveyancing firms they only processed about 7% of all transactions in November with the top 10 firms accounting for a larger market share between them.
Figures from this time last year are broadly similar to this period.
The full year figures should be available at the end of January and will make for interesting reading. To see the full data set click on the link below. http://www.landregistry.gov.uk/__data/assets/file/0015/30237/applications_account_customers.csv
