this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Currently trying to buy a house and it's a nightmare, solicitors putting in minimal effort and getting things wrong, then taking forever to fix things. Any time I mention this to someone it seems they have a similar story.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It might not be that your solicitor is bad, but other parties they’re relying on are slow!

That's part of the problem. I had a nightmare selling a family home and it came down to the water board saying they didn't have the property on their books despite supplying water there for decades. Turns out they never had the number on their records and I had a nervous time when I basically had 30 minutes to do a 15 minute drive and find the relevant documents or a relative's sale could have fallen through. So one of the simplest steps could have torpedoed the whole thing.

That sale wasn't helped by the solicitor (a specialist in property law) not registering the house with the Land Registry decades earlier, despite this being discover a dozen years ago and him being instructed to sort it out, which he never did. Coincidentally, he was acting for the people buying the house and was issuing letters hassling us because this hadn't already been done. I was able to find paperwork demonstrating that it was all his fault and it all got sorted.