Well, what a week!
I have always been of the view that the life of a conveyancer can change within an hour and this week just illustrated how true that was. The news that Nationwide had changed their Part II requirements hit us on Tuesday afternoon, but it had all changed by Friday morning.
And that shows the speed at which anything in conveyancing land can change. I have always thought it is important for conveyancers to be prepared for the unexpected as you never know what is going to hit you next. What can be a case, ready to exchange contracts and all set ready for clients to move, can be the case that takes up the most time as someone has a last minute survey done and everyone has to start negotiating a reduction in price but with a deadline in place.
And I am sure that most conveyancers would agree with me that one of the most frequent statements that we hear from client is
‘how do you do this job?’
My answer is that I do love it – it is tiring, frustrating and stressful, but the call when someone has completed and they can go and pick up the keys to their new home is exciting. In among all of the negativity surrounding conveyancing, think about the positives and why we all continue to do this job
This is written by a real high street conveyancer who wishes to remain anonymous. Read more in Today’s Conveyancer every week.
5 responses
1) have a mandated fixed or minimum period between exchange and completion and ‘last minute’ becomes a thing of the past.
So reducing huge stress for all.
2) that call for keys, exciting as it may be….
For tens of thousands per month that call brings only relief, from stress. For that call only came hours after it should have. Hours that they spent with angst and worry , not to mention anger that what should have been a lovely day is going horribly wrong. For it’s 3pm/4pm/5pm and they should have had keys hours ago.
You Conveyancers can enjoy that call…..Then, while you’re relaxing on the sofa at home, having wilfully breached the terms of the contract you had the client sign. Know that they, and their removal crew are still moving in, evening wrecked.
Moving crews expect not the unexpected, but the expected.
That their customers, and themselves will likely have their day ruined. Because, conveyancing.
As much as that may reflect a bad experience for a client, your insinuations about the conveyancer are unfair. We care, we worry too.
We’d also love a mandated period in between exchange and completion but half the time it’s the client that wants asap and won’t listen when we caution against it.
I don’t think anyone should expect a moving day to be lovely, it is even at its most smoothest, disruptive and mildly stressful.
The system is terrible, we do our best within it.
Moving day can be thoroughly enjoyable
It’s conveyancing that causes all the stress.
A profession that asks a client to sign a contract and then breaks that contract willingly, and repeatedly by failing to get the clients funds moved in time.
A profession that still like to take a lunch break at exactly the most important time of the day for their clients.
A profession that thinks it’s acceptable to make moving companies employees work 15-17 hour days.
A profession that thinks it’s acceptable for clients to have horrendous stress for hours in the middle of the day and then work late into the evening. For no other reason that the conveyancing service they’ve received is pathetically awful.
Your point about clients not wanting to wait.
Might this be because Conveyancers handle the process so badly that the client is fed up? That instead of doing pretty much exactly as the conveyancing protocols suggest and only when ready to exchange start discussing completion dates. You allowed the client to repeatedly target completion dates. With scant regard for re-educating them? Or pointing out the folly of this approach?
Conveyancing. Clients use you to facilitate them moving home. For them this experience is exciting. They look forward to it.
Moving companies up and down the land in their thousands know that conveyancing, broadly makes it a misery.
When it doesn’t have to be.
That’s because the customers used the ‘wrong’ conveyancers. They went cheap so ended up with someone illiterate dealing with their matter who doesn’t care and orders money to arrive the day of completion and not the day before. And someone thinks this is all going to be solved by ‘digitisation’!
And if they go ‘good’?
The lack of broad mandated proper standards for the profession just means that the woeful Conveyancers in their chain will ensure they receive the same grief.
There are great Conveyancers. Yet the fragmentation of this profession in terms of standards, and the absolute absence of enforcement of standards means the good get tarnished.
Conveyancing does not have, indeed has never had a written definition of what good customer service, and a great customer experience looks like from the clients perspective.
I’ve challenged some big names within conveyancing to write it. Yet none have accepted the challenge.
If the profession can’t define this, how can it ever expect to deliver it?
Never has so much cognitive dissonance been collectively displayed by so many, over such a long period.