Conveyancing is the legal work of transferring ownership. Most of it is invisible to the parties, which is why it is blamed for delays it did not cause and trusted to catch things it was never asked about. This page describes what the stage consists of. It is a general description and not legal guidance about any transaction.
Title: what is actually being sold
The first task is establishing what the seller owns and on what terms. Registered title records the extent of the land, the class of title, the owner, and the rights and burdens that go with it.
Two categories of burden matter disproportionately. Easements are rights over land, such as a right of way across a neighbour's drive or a right to run drainage under it, and they can run in both directions. Covenants are promises attached to the land, restricting what may be done with it: not to build beyond a line, not to use the property for a trade, not to alter the elevation without consent. Old covenants can be obsolete in practice and still enforceable in principle, which is why they generate so much correspondence.
Boundaries are a frequent surprise. The registered plan shows general position, not exact legal lines, and it is not evidence of precise ownership of a fence. Where the physical boundary and the plan appear to disagree, that is a question to settle before exchange rather than after.
The searches
A search is an enquiry made of a body that holds information about the property or its surroundings. Each search answers a specific question and none of them answers a general one.
The standard searches and what each answers
- Local authority search
- Planning history and decisions, building regulation records, road adoption status, tree preservation orders, conservation area status, and notices affecting the property. It covers the property itself, not the neighbouring land.
- Drainage and water search
- Whether the property is connected to public foul and surface water sewers and to the mains water supply, where the public sewers run, and whether any run within the boundary in a way that would restrict building.
- Environmental search
- Contaminated land risk from historic uses, flood risk, ground stability and landfill history, based on data modelling rather than an inspection of the site.
- Mining or area-specific search
- Commissioned where the location warrants it, covering historic coal, tin, clay, brine or other extraction and any resulting subsidence risk or liability.
- Chancel and other liability checks
- Historic liabilities attaching to some land, usually addressed by an inexpensive indemnity policy rather than by investigation.
- Bankruptcy and lender searches
- Final pre-completion checks protecting the lender's position and confirming nothing has been registered against the title in the interim.
Enquiries
Alongside the searches, the buyer's conveyancer raises enquiries: questions to the seller about the property's history, disputes, alterations, guarantees, services, shared facilities and anything the title or searches have thrown up.
This is where transactions slow down, and usually for mundane reasons. A loft conversion carried out without building regulation sign-off, an extension whose planning permission cannot be found, a boiler with no certificate, a shared drive with no documented arrangement: each requires either a document, an explanation, an indemnity policy or a regularisation, and each takes as long as the slowest party takes to reply.
Leasehold adds a second layer
Where the property is leasehold, everything above still applies and a further set of questions is added: the length of the remaining term, ground rent and how it escalates, service charge levels and history, the reserve fund, the freeholder's and any management company's obligations, consents required for alteration or subletting, and any planned major works.
Major works are the item most often missed. A programme of external repairs decided shortly after completion can produce a bill that dwarfs the negotiation the buyer thought they had won.
What a search cannot tell you
Searches are narrow by design. A local authority search covers the property, so a planning application on the field behind it will not appear unless a separate search of the surrounding area is commissioned. An environmental search is a desk study, not an inspection. None of them assesses condition, and none of them tells you whether the price is sensible.
The other limit is time. Search results describe the position on the day they were issued. In a long transaction they age, which is why final pre-completion checks exist.
Why it takes as long as it does
Almost none of the elapsed time in a conveyancing file is spent on legal analysis. It is spent waiting: for search results from third parties, for replies to enquiries, for management packs from freeholders, for lender conditions, and for the other links in a chain to reach the same point. The two things that genuinely shorten it are starting early and answering quickly.