A lovely client of mine, who moved house two weeks ago, popped into my office this week to drop in a bottle of wine to thank me for helping him to move. It had been a difficult transaction. You know the one where you have a particular firm who will only do simultaneous exchange and completion, but you have six in a chain and they need to secure removals.
In the end, his move went well. I knew that he had not moved house for 30 years so I thought (perhaps stupidly) I would take the opportunity of asking him what he had thought about the process. His response:
“I don’t know how or why you do your job.”
You will be nodding with this as it is something I hear most days at various stages of the transaction. I told him that he would probably not be surprised to hear that I am asked this question most days. I asked him (again perhaps stupidly) why he thought that – he was a retired lecturer and I knew/hoped he would give me a sensible answer. He answered:
“Where do you want me to start? It wasn’t you – it was just that there were so many different things that we had not even considered that you managed to juggle and keep going even when you were banging your head against walls. But throughout, you kept us positive and calm.”
And that is it, isn’t it, fellow conveyancers? That is what we do on a daily basis. We are like project managers, pulling things together to achieve the moving day for people who don’t do this often and don’t really know the magic of what we do. We are doing this for the public.
Perhaps those commentators that say the system is broken need to come and spend a week at the coalface to see how it works in practice.
It is not perfect, but people move house every day – some moves are good, some moves are bad – but that is like everything in life. People move and we know that they will be moving in a week, a month, a year.
The process will be tweaked, perhaps with extra digitisation, but people rely on us to get them moving. So, keep paddling furiously under the desk while remaining calm to those clients who trust us to get them moved.
This is written by a real high street conveyancer who wishes to remain anonymous. Read more in Today’s Conveyancer every week.
