Buying or selling your home

The seller’s solicitors will prepare the contracts of sale and send them to your solicitors for review. Your solicitor will then raise any enquiries they have about the property or the terms of the contract with the seller’s solicitors. If the property is a leasehold, this should be confirmed at this stage and the details of the lease clarified.

Your solicitor will arrange for conveyancing checks to be carried out, including Local Authority and Environment Agency searches. These checks identify any issues that could potentially impact you once the purchase is complete.

While this step is optional, you should think carefully about having a property survey carried out. This means getting a surveyor to check the condition of the property for any potential problems you would need to fix. There are different levels of survey you can have carried out, depending on how thorough an inspection you would like and how much detail you would like concerning any problems.

You will need to transfer a deposit of 10% of the purchase price to your solicitor. They will hold this for you to transfer to the seller’s solicitors when you exchange contracts.

Once you and your solicitor are happy with the contracts of sale, both you and the seller will sign copies, then exchange them via your solicitors. At this point, you are legally committed to buying the property and the seller is legally committed to sell. If you were to pull out for any reason after this point, your 10% deposit could be kept by the seller.

Completion is the date on which the balance of the purchase price is transferred to the seller. If you are paying a larger than 10% deposit, you will need to transfer the rest of your funds to your solicitor in advance. If the rest is being covered by a mortgage, your mortgage provider will take care of this for you. Once completion has taken place, the property is now legally yours.

After completion, your solicitor will record the details of your new ownership and any mortgage provider with HM Land Registry. It typically takes anywhere from a few months to a year for the Registry to be updated.

You will need to provide various key pieces of information for the purposes of drawing up the contracts of sale. Your conveyancing solicitor will guide you through this process.

Once they have all of the necessary information, your solicitor will prepare the draft contracts of sale setting out the terms of the transaction.

It is likely that the buyer’s solicitor will raise various enquiries about the property, so your solicitor may need further information from you in order to answer these points. This is a normal part of the process and should not be cause for concern.

Once both sides are happy with the terms of the contract, you and the buyer will each sign copies and these will be exchanged via your solicitors. From this point on, you are legally obligated to see the sale through, as is the buyer. Failure to complete on your part could result in the buyer raising a legal claim against you. The buyer will pay a 10% deposit at this point and, if they were to pull out, you would be legally entitled to keep the deposit.

On the agreed date, the outstanding balance will be transferred by the buyer’s solicitor to your solicitor. At this point, the sale is complete and the buyer is the new owner of the property. Your solicitor will then use the funds to pay off any outstanding mortgage balance you have and pay you the remainder.