Conveyancers: join our campaign to reduce delays to leasehold property purchases

It will not be news to any conveyancers reading this article that management companies are very often responsible for causing considerable delays to leasehold property purchases.

As anyone familiar with these transactions will testify, requests for leasehold information from management companies can sometimes take weeks to receive. This is not welcomed by hard-pressed conveyancers. In fact, when it comes to leasehold transactions, management companies can be the bane of a conveyancer's life.

For those readers who are not conveyancers, in order to provide a real idea of the scale of this issue, approximately 200,000, or one in every five, properties sold in the UK per year are leasehold properties.

In each of these cases, conveyancers are required to contact the management company or residents' association in charge of the building in which the property they are handling is situated, in order to obtain the necessary paperwork they require to progress a sale.

Now, a recent Conveyancing Association (CA) members' survey shows that the average time it takes for management companies to get back to a conveyancer with this information is three weeks - with some cases taking up to eight. In addition, in return for providing this information (not so promptly, as we have seen), management companies give buyers an average bill of £350, with some costs exceeding £800.

In practical terms, eight weeks can of course cause huge delays to a home-buying process, which in turn can cause a huge amount of stress for both the buyer and the seller, drive up costs, and in the worst-case scenario, even threaten the sale. It goes without saying that the extra costs incurred as a result do not exactly help soothe the situation either.

The problem however can also have far-reaching consequences for the market as delays in one transaction can affect numerous other sellers and buyers if there is a chain involved, causing even more unnecessary stress to countless people.

Campaign for change

As the voice of the commercially-minded, service-focused conveyancer, this is, of course, of great concern to the CA and, as a result, we last year embarked on a campaign to do something about it - namely, to work with legislators to change the law so that management companies are required to deliver information within a set time period and at a set cost.

To this end, in October, the CA asked its members to write to their local MPs regarding the issues that conveyancers - and indeed, consumers - face as a result of delays caused to transaction by management committees.

This initial stage of the campaign led to, in January this year, CA representatives (myself included) meeting with a number of members of parliament in Westminster to discuss the issue and put forward our suggested solution. We have since been working with those we met to draft and table a number of parliamentary questions, designed to find out more about the scale of the problem - and the extent to which the government holds relevant data relating to it.

While we wait for answers to be published in response to the parliamentary questions, we are very keen to gain a better understanding of the extent to which this issue affects conveyancers, generally. In order to do this we, together with Solicitors Journal, are going to publish a brief survey and we hope that as many readers as possible will take a few minutes out of their busy day to participate.

By doing so, you will help us move the campaign forward. Please help us to help you!