Diary of a High Street Conveyancer – Bank Holiday Monday blues

I switched on my lap top on Monday – yes, I know it’s Bank Holiday but I am sure that we all check our emails at some point over the weekend, even when it is a Bank Holiday – and there were so many emails asking for updates.

Now, please feel free to add to this list but there was the following:

• Lender exchange
• LMS
• Estate agents
• Help to Buy ISA portal
• New build site office
• Developer at the top of a chain where my client is the first time buyer

When did my life become so focussed on updates rather than actually doing the work? And this was on a Saturday. Now I know some of these are auto generated but even so, it is demoralising, and I have to say three out of the four will get the same answer… we are waiting on the Land Registry to complete the application!

And we all can guess that if we do not reply to an estate agent over the weekend, then first thing on Tuesday, the client will call and ask us why we did not respond to an email from the estate agent, even though such email was on a Saturday!

Conveyancing is becoming more and more a twenty four a day hour job. It is so hard when the email inbox is full first thing in the morning, and I understand that clients are worried about their house moves and wake up in the night fretting about it and want to send an email and do not expect an immediate response.

But we have to be so careful not to email over the weekend and in the evenings as it sets that expectation that we are available all of the time. We may be working on a Bank Holiday but this is because we want to catch up with the work load, not necessarily update everyone on what we would like to do if we were not being asked to give updates.

There must be a better way but conveyancing is such a personal matter. To the client they are the only matter as far as they are concerned… and we all have that one client who even says that he or she does not care about other clients. Our job is tiring, exhausting, all consuming…. But still worth it?

This is written by a real high street conveyancer who wishes to remain anonymous. Read more in Today’s Conveyancer every week.