Pre-Contract Legal Services
For Buyers
This starts once you have made an offer for a property which has been accepted. This is the most important part of the transaction and is by means a formality.
We will make the preliminary searches and raise preliminary enquiries and we will consider the responses we receive. If necessary we will call for additional information or documents.
We will consider the draft contract and we will investigate the seller’s title to the property. We will write to you reporting what we have discovered in the form of a comprehensive report.
We will refer you to relevant rights and restrictions and highlight any unusual issues which may have been revealed. We will also check that you have the funding available and correspond with your lender to clear any outstanding mortgage conditions, and where you have a related sale we will correspond with your buyer’s solicitors.
Once you are happy with the report and we are happy that the funding is available (and where you have a sale that the sale is ready to proceed too) you will be required to sign the contract to allow exchange of contracts to proceed.
For Sellers
You are selling your house and you have accepted an offer. We will need to send a contract to your buyer. Before we can do this we will need sight of your deeds to check your title. If we have not acted for you before you will need to send us the deeds or tell us where they are.
Once we have the deeds we will prepare a contract and send it with evidence of your title to the buyer’s solicitors. We will also take your instructions on enquiries raised by your buyer’s solicitors about the property. The buyer will also undertake preliminary searches.
Once the buyer’s solicitors have concluded their investigations they will approve the contract and we will arrange for you to sign it. We will then exchange contracts which will commit you legally to the transaction and fix the moving or completion date. We will of course check that the completion date is acceptable for you and others involved in the transaction before we proceed.
It is important that you instruct us at an early stage. The sooner we are involved the quicker the contract and other documents can be prepared and sent to the buyer’s solicitors.
