Paragon Residential Conveyancing Panel Information

The Council of Mortgage Lenders, together with Paragon Residential and other stakeholders created a standard set of requirements where a solicitor is acting for a lender such as Paragon Residential alone in a residential conveyancing transaction. These legal instructions are contained at Part Three of the UK Finance Lenders’ Handbook and are to be followed in conjunction with Parts 1 & 2. The CML have published an example requirements letter to the borrower’s conveyancer for adaptation by the lender's conveyancer, and sets out to the borrower's conveyancer, the documentary and information requirements of the lender's panel conveyancer.

We can't comment specifically on Paragon Residential. Many major lenders are now introducing ‘file auditing’ as standard practice in relation to completed matters. This raises questions of confidentiality in relation to the borrower and the purpose to which the results of such audits will be put. The starting point is to remember that the file does not belong to your firm, it belongs to the ‘client’. But, of course, we will normally have two clients – the buyer and the lender - and you will owe a duty of confidentiality to each. So basically, you have to separate the file and just send the lender the parts solely relating to themselves. But, of course, as this will basically be correspondence with the lender, mortgage instructions etc.

Check with your COLP but a firm should not send the complete conveyancing file without the buyer client’s express consent – and if he is in dispute with the lender he is hardly likely to agree. However, if the lender can establish a prima facie case of fraud, then you may be under an obligation to disclose the whole file.

The emerging convention is that lenders are including an authority to disclose in loan application forms to counter this problem. Mortgage Express v Sawali, [2010] EWHC 3054 (Ch) indicates that such provisions are valid. Please click here for more information about that case.

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

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

10 potential conveyancing clients attempt to locate a property lawyer on the Paragon Residential panel on a monthly basis in Hendon. Feel free to contact the Lexsure team who will tell how your firm can be identified by those searching for conveyancing in Hendon.

We would recommend that you supply details of the date of removal, information on the reason for removal, date of appeal and any reason given for reinstatement. This should not adversely impact your firm’s application but gives the CQS team viability as to what has occured.

You need to contact Paragon Residential to obtain standard documents. The The Council of Mortgage Lenders Handbook contains an explicit question for banks to reveal who to contact to obtain standard documents. Paragon Residential in their Part 2’s state: It helps to disclose the firm’s Paragon Residential solicitors panel reference.