No two house moves are the same; no two clients are the same. This is something we have to remember and this week, I was reminded that however well we think we are doing our job, it is the client who ultimately matters.
I have a horrendous chain. The typical scenario where the sale by my client was agreed on the basis that the buyer did not need to sell their property in order to buy my client’s house. How many times do we hear this and then find that the buyer is either having to remortgage their present property or decides that they will sell their house …
With the buyer deciding that he would sell, it means that there are now two extra transactions and the first time buyer is an investor. My client is buying a house from an elderly couple who are downsizing to a new build retirement property. So my chain has an investor first time buyer, and a developer at the top – and we all know how this is going to go, don’t we? The investor wants to complete after the beginning of April for tax reasons. The developers will withdraw the incentive if we do not complete next week. In fact, the developers were going to withdraw the incentive if we had not exchanged by Friday so we are waiting to see the financial implications of that. And meanwhile, my client just wants to move.
On Friday, my client was becoming more and more frustrated; the difficulty is that I cannot talk to the first time buyer’s solicitor. My client asked me if I knew what he did for a job; I did not, and he proceeded to tell me that he worked in “customer experience”, and then told me that moving house was the worst experience he had ever been through. I was interested in his view and listened to him telling me why. He did not understand why there was no transparency in the process; he did not understand why people (solicitors, agents and clients) did not communicate with each other better; he did not understand why, with the advent of modern technology, we could not all communicate in “round robin” emails or have a WhatsApp group with all of the lawyers in it. I have complete sympathy with his position, but unless you work in the conveyancing market, it is difficult to understand why we end up in these positions. But it is people, and as I pointed out to him, everyone starts the process of moving house with a common goal but for different reasons and with different agendas. The investor is not emotionally involved with the house he is buying; the developer just wants to maximise profit and penalise those who prevent that from happening; my client just wants to move to a larger house for a growing family.
I am hoping that this week will be better for him. We know that it is very rare that clients get so fed up with the process that they walk away because they will only have to start again, but I felt so sorry for him and his family and others in the chain. He has spent a weekend not knowing if he is going to move this week. I will update you further next week …
This is written by a real high street conveyancer who wishes to remain anonymous. Read more in Today’s Conveyancer every week.
