LendInvest Conveyancing Panel Information

The Council of Mortgage Lender requirements of LendInvest are silent on this. Most lenders deal with the issue of file retention via their Terms of panel appointment where they generally provide that for evidential purposes, the firm must keep the file for at least of 6 years from the date of the mortgage. Data imagining is normally suitable compliance with this requirement. Many lenders point out in that it is the practice of some fraudsters to demand the conveyancing file on completion in order to destroy evidence that may later be used against them. It is therefore important to retain these documents to protect LendInvest’s interest. To be absolutely sure of LendInvest requirements in this regard please check the Terms and Conditions of LendInvest’s conveyancing panel membership.

There are many reports available, five of which are as follows:

• Number of conveyancing cases by lender
• Average time frame to register charges at the Land Registry
• The percentage of the firm’s business which is conveyancing (broken down into sale/purchase and remortgage)
• Buy to Let transactions
• Disclosure/Notification to Lender analysis indicating frequency and nature of disclosures - to include benchmarking analysis against aggregate data

You need to be careful here as what you are suggesting 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. An increasing amount of lenders are making 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 conveyancer. 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 LendInvest 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 LendInvest panel. The situation that you find yourself in is where your client’s purchaser has his/her own lawyer and LendInvest 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 LendInvest’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 LendInvest. You will no doubt be required to undertake directly to LendInvest’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 LendInvest conveyancing panel.

CQS membership gives no guarantee to lender panel acceptance. Nevertheless the Council of Mortgage Lenders have indicated that it is likely to become a prerequisite for firms wishing to remain on their approved list of conveyancing solicitors. A number of Lenders now use CQS as the starting point for Panel membership as is the case with Santander.

You would be advised to contact LendInvest to obtain standard documents. The CML Handbook incorporates an explicit section for banks to cite who to contact to obtain standard documents. LendInvest in their Part 2’s state: You will need to disclose your LendInvest solicitors panel number.