“Can’t move as planned? Our fees will be canned!”

A leading law firm is set to waive its conveyancing fees if clients’ property purchases do not complete before the date their mortgage offer expires.

With offers expiring or being withdrawn at an increasing rate amidst interest rate rises, the firm has launched the campaign, eloquently dubbed: “Can’t move as planned? Our fees will be canned!”

NO FEES! With products and offer extensions being withdrawn from the #mortgage market, our #ResidentialProperty team is promising that if deadlines aren’t met, there’ll be no fee for their work.#housingmarket #housingmarketupdates #conveyancing #property pic.twitter.com/vvLhWsFIy3

— Dutton Gregory (@DuttonGregory) September 8, 2022

Today’s Conveyancer spoke to Dutton Gregory’s Paul Sams, partner and head of property, to understand more about the campaign.

Paul, what led to the introduction of this campaign?

With the consistent rise of interest rates, clients purchasing a property are at risk of their mortgage interest rate increasing if they do not complete their purchase within the timeframe set out in their mortgage offer.

We had a prime example just this past week; clients had been trying to purchase since January, their mortgage offer expired at the beginning of this month. The sellers actually switched lawyers because the firm they were using were not getting back to them. Thankfully, we managed to get the matter completed in time. If we had not, then the next-best rate the client was offered by his broker would have resulted in him paying another £25,000 (plus an arrangement fee of nearly £2,000) over the fixed rate period of his offer. £27,000.00 is a lot of money to anyone.

Lenders are currently very reluctant to extend mortgage offers so clients are motivated to get their purchase completed in good time. We are too.

How is this campaign compatible with some commentators’ view that firms under-price their conveyancing fees?

We never have [under-priced our fees] and never will. There is always someone who can do anything cheaper. There is always less expensive alternative. Price is not our driver, nor will it ever be our driver. Having good quality people who feel appreciated will result in a better service to clients and introducers.

To do that, we need to charge a fair price. The fact that we have so many people wanting to work with us is testimony to this and the great work the team here do. I could set up a factory somewhere I suppose grinding out work, but that is not what we are about. Conveyancing is a team sport and I want to have the best people on my team so that means we have to charge a good fee for a good service.

What are you hoping the impact of the campaign will be?

This is to attract more clients to us, encourage trust, and put ourselves out in the marketplace as an innovative firm wanting to grow.

More so, it is a bold statement that people will remember us for – trying to help them now when there is a huge amount of negativity in the marketplace, too many enquiries, searches taking too long etc.

We want to be ahead of the game and helping our clients plus introducers achieve their aims. So many firms refused to take on new work for the past 12 months and we never did that.

Ultimately, we want everyone to be aware that there is an issue here with the length of time a mortgage offer is valid for, with very good reason. Lenders have been ever so flexible in the past couple of years during the pandemic and afterwards, but they are at the mercy of the money markets. Interest rates have been so low for so long there comes a point that they were always going to rise. They are still relatively low, and I suspect that we won’t see ridiculously high rates, but they will be higher than the past few years.

We need parties to be aware that a mortgage offer may expire and to make sure everyone works together to get the deal done. We have and always will make sure that a deadline is met, but we are only one part of the transaction. All other parties need to want to work in harmony.