Lloyds Banking Group, which includes Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland,have committed to guaranteeing to process all completions submitted at least a week before the SDLT deadline provided it has received Certificates of Title no later than 25th March.
The lender conveyancers must submit Certificates of Title on or by 25th March to guarantee beating the SDLT deadline. Thereafter they say they will do everything than but cannot offer any guarantees. The lender says it is expecting to see 50% more completions in March than usual as the rush of buyer hope to beat the SDLT deadline.
Amanda Bryden, Head of Halifax Intermediaries & Scottish Widows Bank at Lloyds Banking Group, said:
“With the new thresholds for Stamp Duty coming in just days, we are expecting a rush of customers trying to complete their purchase and avoid the extra cost. We’ve been working with mortgage brokers and solicitors to get ready for this, and we have seen evidence of many completing purchases early.
“We’ll do everything we can to get completions turned around before the Stamp Duty deadline if they come to us after 25th March, but there’s no guarantee. That’s why we are reminding conveyancers to get Certificates of Title to us no later than the 25th March, and sooner if they can, to be sure to beat the deadline.”
Conveyancers will be hoping any repeat of the brief outage Lloyds experienced at the end of February will be avoided as activity ramps up toward the SDLT deadline on 31st March. Property portal Rightmove say there are around 1/2m home moves currently active in the home moving market, with the resultant ‘logjam’ likely to result in 74,000 home movers, including 25,000 first time buyers, missing the deadline.
3 responses
It’s the 18th today;
Given that there are reports from movers all over the country of people crying and shouting on the phone because all the moving co oabies are already full. It’s going to be interesting seeing how this plays out.
There are @600 less movers operating now than in the Covid housing boom.
Are Conveyancers equipped to cope in what will be an awful lot of situations where people have exchanged, but can’t get out of their house / can’t get in?
This time it’s different.
What are you saying Matt, clients should book their remover before they exchange and agree the end of the month for completion?
Up and down the country we have movers everywhere reporting clients paying them in full, non-refundable, BEFORE exchange.
It’s absolute hysteria.
Today we lost count (genuinely) of the number of people we turned away for 26/27/28 March.
We are chock full next week and at least half are paid in full and haven’t exchanged yet.
31st is half booked, not one has exchanged. All are paid. All know it’s non refundable.
What I’m saying Rob is that the raw mathematics is fairly nailed on. IF the data (well, estimates) are correct about the numbers out there still trying to get completed. There simply will not be the capacity to cope with demand.
Even if Conveyancers manage to achieve the workload. There will not be enough movers. Moreover many many movers will have loaded up on provisional dates way beyond capacity before cherry picking the expensive work. All others will be rejected.
This is (unfortunately) normal behaviour during busy periods. These unfortunate people then get picked up by spare capacity elsewhere.
However, we’ve just had a dire, awful 30 or so months. Movers have gone bust. Movers have reduced in size. The supply level isn’t there.
Frankly I think the absolute s11it show is only just presenting itself.
A LOT of Conveyancers are going to be ready to exchange and suddenly find their client simply can’t get moved.
Also, that a LOT of people this time are going to find their movers don’t arrive. The lower portion of my industry will overbook, and only do what they feel like doing. As mentioned above.
Only this time the numbers won’t be few, they’ll be many.
It’s going to be a horror show to end March.