Outsourcing Conveyancing – Title Checking

Outsourcing parts of the conveyancing process via Interim Lawyers, the legal recruitment platform for solicitors.

Outsourcing – is it the future?

As is the fashion now in most businesses, trades and professions the conveyancing firms in the UK are starting to look at ways of saving substantial amounts of overheads by outsourcing parts of the conveyancing transaction. Whether this is a fad that only occurs for the next few years remains to be seen, but there are of course various initiatives coming in to streamline the whole conveyancing process in any event. There are law firms out there exploring the various options of using outsourced consultants to undertake title checks and other parts of the conveyancing process.

Title Checking

We have been approached today by a conveyancing practice looking to outsource title checking. We have worked on similar assignments in the past and we know that there are consultants out there who will entertain this type of work. Interestingly, when we ran this past our 400 plus locum conveyancers to see if anyone was interested in sub-contracting directly with the firm, we have had possibly the best return on a locum assignment in the past 10 years, as over 30 locums immediately applied to say that they were interested. A significant number of these were already providing similar services to other solicitors firms and licensed conveyancers across the UK, so it is clear that this is something that firms have picked up on as an option to save on overheads going forward.

Future Prospects for Salaried Staff

Of course it does not bode as well for salaried staff working in-house for the conveyancing firms, but it has never been a particularly well remunerated market and the benefit of both the consultant undertaking work on an outsourced basis and the firm outsourcing the work is that payment is only made when there is work available and to complete.

One of the difficulties traditionally for conveyancing practices has been when there is a down to the property market. The conveyancing practice has to keep paying staff even when there is no work to be undertaken, and all of a sudden they end up in terrible financial difficulties. This can lead to the practice closing down or making strings of redundancies, but a practice outsourcing the parts of the transaction can run their practices on a much more streamlined basis.

Downside of Outsourcing

The downside to outsourcing are that the practice retains no control whatsoever over the work and is totally dependent on the external consultant completing the work within the time allotted.

If you use a consultant who turns out to be completely unreliable then your clients sooner or later are going to get a little bit annoyed with you when delays kick in. However the opposite side to this is that it is possible to shield the client completely from the fact that you were using an external consultant, because of course they never need know. The client rarely knows what is occurring on their file, and is more interested in the end result.

Price List – Title Checking

Here is a recent example price list from a locum conveyancer available for title check work:

£20 if freehold
£30 if freehold and search report
£30 if unregistered freehold
£40 if unregistered and search report
£60 if leasehold
£70 if leasehold and search report
£80 if unregistered leasehold
£100 if unregistered and search report
£100 if freehold new build
£120 if leasehold new build
£150 if leasehold, new build and shared ownership
25%- uplift for 24 hour turnaround.

Quotation Request

If you would like a quote from us for the provision of title checking services to your residential conveyancing department, please drop an email across to jbfagan@interimlawyers.co.uk or give us a call on 08002465001.