The need for specialist conveyancers in a post-pandemic market

This revealed that April through June saw the highest figures ever recorded, hitting over 290k, a 20% increase on Q1 and 252% up on the same period in 2020, which you’ll no doubt remember saw the housing market closed down for two months.

Q3 still has a month to run, but I’m going to suggest the figures will be some way down on this, although it will be intriguing to see what sort of spike in transactions (if any?) we see during September, because of the end of the partial stamp duty holiday.

Again, those Q2 figures tell us that the number of active conveyancing firms recovered to pre-pandemic levels, plus the average number of cases per firm was up to 72, improving from 61 in Q1 2021.

That average are interesting because there were literally thousands of firms active in the conveyancing space during that period, as demand jumped and individuals sought out any firm that could potentially get them through to completion by the end of June.

But, as has been the case for many years, I fully anticipate the number of firms involved in conveyancing to drop again quarter-on-quarter as we return to a more normal marketplace. That means the specialist, volume operators will return to doing the bulk of the heavy lifting – as they have done for many years – but without that extra business to be shared around.

This last year may have taught us much, but I wonder what it has taught those practitioners and stakeholders – and especially their clients – who were forced to rely upon firms who are not specialists in the conveyancing space?

Of course, even the volume players could only take on so much during this period, and it may well have been that the smaller solicitors threw more resource at their conveyancing clients, but the reality will have been that – particularly for complex cases – there are likely to have been a significant number who missed out because the firm they chose were unable to meet that deadline.

From my perspective, it draws into the sharpest of light, the need for a specialist. It’s all well and good a firm getting through a busy period being able to complete vanilla residential cases, but as I’m sure advisers will see only too often, there are a growing number of cases which do not fit this bill.

Would, for instance, you want an equity release client going with a high-street solicitor? I suspect not. What about someone purchasing a rental property through a limited company vehicle? What about cases where a parent is providing a gifted deposit? Or joint borrower/single occupier cases?

Very few cases these days don’t have at least the slimmest layer of complexity about them, and if you are not carrying out this work 24/7, then getting to the bottom of those queries, pulling the information and data together, etc, is going to take you longer. Add in even greater length if you don’t have a fully-resourced department doing the work.

So, while some high-street and family firms might have used the last few months to make hay while the sun shined, this particular summer is over and is unlikely to return unless the Government feels it needs to intervene in the market again in such a sizeable fashion.

I believe we are many year from this, and advisers active in providing conveyancing advice are going to want their clients working with specialists in order to ensure they can meet their transaction deadlines. The last quarter of 2021 will reveal just how fast we return to this picture, but let’s just say that the specialists are going nowhere, but clients that go elsewhere are always running the risk.