West Bromwich Mortgage Company Conveyancing Panel Information

Unlike the CML the Building Society Mortgage Instructions deal with this. Section A.12 states ‘In order to act on our behalf your firm or company must be a member of our conveyancing panel provided we are a society that operates one – see specific requirements for details of our arrangements. The Special Requirements state:

You must also comply with the terms and conditions of your West Bromwich Mortgage Company solicitor panel appointment.

The BSA is not a regulator and therefore do not advise on complaints against lenders. You can of course contact Lexsure to see if we can help.

The BSA do not involve themselves in training however they do arrange numerous general legal related conferences which are attended by firms on the West Bromwich Mortgage Company conveyancing panel. It is our intention to run specific lender focused seminars in the coming months including a webinar on West Bromwich Mortgage Company’s obligations . Practitioners on the West Bromwich Mortgage Company conveyancing panel are welcome . Information about the webinar will be made available as part of the LENDERmonitor change Notifications .

If you are a solicitor and have a question relating to the Specific Requirements, you should make contact with West Bromwich Mortgage Company. The BSA will not advise or comment on specific queries relating to West Bromwich Mortgage Company or other lenders.

The criteria to join the West Bromwich Mortgage Company conveyancing panel is likely to be fairly detailed and is unlikely to include signing up to LENDERmonitor alerts.

We only know of a couple of banks that operate a distinct approved solicitors panel where the mortgage advance is over a certain level. You should nevertheless check directly with West Bromwich Mortgage Company. At one stage HSBC would only allow Sole practitioners to act for them where the mortgage was below £150,000. We are not sure if HSBC still operate such a condition. In your case it is best to check with West Bromwich Mortgage Company

We can't comment specifically on West Bromwich Mortgage Company. 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 Compliance Officer, but a firm should not send the complete conveyancing file without the borrower client’s express consent – and if he is in arrears 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 valid? Please click here for more information about that case.

BSA lenders do not come within the top 20 lenders in terms of frequency of questions. The most popular lender panels in terms of questions are as follows:

• Santander Conveyancing Panel
• National Westminster Bank Conveyancing Panel
• Royal Bank of Scotland Conveyancing Panel
• HSBC Conveyancing Panel
• Lloyds Conveyancing Panel