My partner and I are looking to purchase a house in Burnt Oak and are in fact using a Burnt Oak conveyancing practice. Within the past 48 hours our lawyer has forwarded the sale agreement to be signed with a detailed report with the expectation that exchange is imminent. Britannia have this evening contacted us to inform me that they have now hit a problem as our Burnt Oak conveyancer is not on their conveyancing panel. Please explain?
If you are buying a property with the assistance of a mortgage it is usual for the purchasers' solicitors to also represent the mortgage company. In order to act for a bank or building society a law firm has to be on that lender's conveyancing panel. An application has to be made by the law firm to the lender to become a member of the lender's panel and there are increasingly strict criteria which the firm has to satisfy and indeed some lenders now require their panel members to be part of the Law Society’s Conveyancing Quality Scheme. Your property lawyer should contact your mortgage company and see if they can apply for membership of their conveyancing panel, but if that is not viable they will instruct their own solicitors to act. You are not legally obliged to appoint a law firm on the bank's conveyancing panel and you may continue to use your own Burnt Oak solicitors, in which case it will likely add costs, and it may delay matters as you are adding another lawyer into the mix.
I am buying a property without a mortgage in Burnt Oak. I have been living for the last dozen years in Burnt Oak. Conveyancing searches are a lot of money. As I know the road and vicinity intimately must I have all the conveyancing searches?
If you not getting a home loan, then all but one or two of the Burnt Oak conveyancing searches are at your discretion. Your solicitor will ’encourage you, no-doubt strongly, that you should have searches completed, but he has a professional duty to take that path of guidance. One thing to bear in mind; if you are likely to sell the house in the future, it could be of interest to your future purchaser what the searches disclose. On occasion premises with day to day issues can still reveal unfavourable search results. A good conveyancing solicitor in Burnt Oak will provide you some constructive guidance concerning this.
The Burnt Oak conveyancing lawyers that I recently instructed on my purchase in Burnt Oak have without warning shut down. They were on acting for me because I needed a solicitor on the Clydesdale conveyancing panel and my previous Burnt Oak lawyer was not. I paid them £170 on account. What do I do now?
Assuming that you have an Estate Agent in the equation then let them know immediately so that they advise the vendors that there may be a slight delay due to the problems encountered. Hopefully they will be sympathetic and urge their lawyer to send a new set of papers to your new solicitors. You will need to appoint new lawyers that are on the Clydesdale conveyancing panel and notify the lender. If you have paid over any money, it will hopefully be held by the SRA as money in an intervened firm's bank accounts is transferred to the SRA. Then, the SRA or the intervention agent looks at the intervened firm's accounts to work out who the money belongs to. To claim your money you will need to contact the SRA. If the SRA cannot return money you are owed from the firm's bank accounts, or if they can only return part of the money, you can apply to the Compensation Fund for a grant. Your new lawyers may be able to assist.
My colleague suggested that if I am purchasing in Burnt Oak I should ask my conveyancer to execute a Neighbourhood, Planning and Local Amenity Search. Can you explain what the purpose of this search is?
A search of this type is occasionally included in the estimate for your Burnt Oak conveyancing searches. It is a large report of more than thirty pages, listing and setting out significant information about Burnt Oak around the property and the people living there. It includes an Aerial Photograph, Planning Applications, Land Use, Mobile Phone Masts, Rights of Way, the Burnt Oak Housing Market, Council Tax Banding, the type of People living in the area, the dominant type of Housing, the Average Property Price, Crime details, Local Education with maps and statistics, Local Amenities and other useful data about Burnt Oak.
I used Arc property Solicitors several years past for my conveyancing in Burnt Oak. I now require my papers but the law firm is no longer operating. What do I do?
Do call the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA) to assist in tracing your conveyancing files. They can be contacted on please contact on 0870 606 2555. Alternatively, you should use their online form to make an enquiry. You will need to provide the SRA with as much information as possible to assist their search, including the name and address in Burnt Oak of the conveyancing firm of solicitors you previously retained, the name of conveyancing solicitor with whom you had dealings, and the date on which you last had dealings with the firm.
In what way does the Landlord & Tenant Act 1954 affect my business offices in Burnt Oak and how can you help?
The 1954 Act affords protection to commercial lessees, granting the dueness to apply to court for a renewal lease and continue in occupation when the lease comes to an end. There are limited grounds where a landlord can refrain from granting a lease renewal and the rules are involved. Fees are different for commercial conveyancing. Burnt Oak is one of our hundreds of areas of the UK in which our lawyers are based