Landbay Partners Conveyancing Panel Information

The Council of Mortgage Lenders is an association rather than a regulator and therefore cannot investigate grievances against lenders. You can of course contact Lexsure to see if we can help.

In the same way that there is a unique Landbay Partners conveyancing panel most building societies, operate a conveyancing panel for solicitors and other conveyancers that the lender will instruct. Terms and Conditions and criteria for inclusion on a building society conveyancing panel vary from lender-to-lender. Having CQS accreditation may be a requirement. Institutional lenders, such as a building society, is a client and is entitled to instruct the solicitor or conveyancer of its choosing (who, in turn, is free to accept or refuse instructions). Therefore, if lender and borrower cannot agree which solicitor or conveyancer should represent them jointly, they would usually proceed on a separate representation basis. The BSA have not published the equivalent of the UK Finance Lenders’ Handbook Part 3s.

You need to be careful here as what you are intending may not be acceptable to the lender. It is possible that you (as a non-panel firm) or the mortgage applicant are not at liberty instruct a panel firm of your choice. Lenders such as Nationwide BS make it clear to their panel firms that where a non-panel member firm is instructed by one of their mortgage applicants, the lender must appoint a panel firm to carry out its instructions and to liaise with the borrower's conveyancing firm. You also need to make the costs implications and potential for delay very clear to your client.

You will be aware of the trend in recent years for lenders such as Landbay Partners to take a much more pro-active approach in relation to the management and make up of their conveyancer panels. The knock on effect of this is that it is more likely that there will be a higher number of cases where a conveyancer is not on the Landbay Partners panel. The situation that you find yourself in is where your client’s purchaser has his/her own lawyer and Landbay Partners have appointed a separate lawyer to act on their behalf where the new CML Part 3 requirements apply. Section 11.1 of the UK Finance Lenders’ Handbook Part 3 requires Landbay Partners’s panel solicitor to ‘ ...transfer the mortgage advance directly to the Seller’s conveyancer. The Seller’s conveyancer must be required to hold the mortgage advance on the terms of the required undertaking. The example borrower’s conveyancer’s undertaking letter includes a specific example of the seller’s undertaking’. You should expect to be advised to received the mortgage advance directly from the conveyancing solicitors for Landbay Partners. You will no doubt be required to undertake directly to Landbay Partners’s solicitors to discharge any charges secured on the property and to send directly to them the executed transfer and any other documents required to enable us to effect registration. Please remember to carefully consider undertakings in accordance with your firm’s protocol and record them in your undertakings logg. Please remember that as well as this breach of this undertaking having regulatory and compliance implications it’s breach could also result in your firm being removed off the Landbay Partners conveyancing panel.

The best placed professionals to answer this question are your insurance brokers. The chances are that on the basis that you have not been removed for fraud or negligence reasons that there will be little or no impact. The main reason why a firm would be removed off of a lender panel is due to low volume of conveyancing cases although there may be a number of criteria for Landbay Partners solicitor panel membership. Please remember that it is always important that you complete your insurance forms accurately.

You would be advised to communicate with Landbay Partners to obtain standard documents. The CML Handbook incorporates an explicit inquiry for banks to reveal who to contact to obtain standard documents. Landbay Partners in their Part 2’s state: Don’t forget to disclose your Landbay Partners solicitors panel number.