Conveyancing is the legal process of transferring ownership of property from one person to another. In England and Wales it covers everything between an offer being accepted and the keys changing hands: checking who legally owns the property, what rights and obligations come with it, whether anything is about to be built next to it, and finally moving the money and registering you as the new owner.
The word puts people off, and the process is deliberately opaque from the outside. What follows is the plain-English version: who does the work, what they are actually checking, how long it really takes now, and which parts of it you can influence.
Quick answer: Conveyancing is the legal transfer of property ownership, carried out by a solicitor, a licensed conveyancer or a chartered legal executive. Buyer and seller each instruct their own. It runs from instruction through searches and enquiries to exchange of contracts, then completion and registration at HM Land Registry. GOV.UK’s How to Sell a Home guide allows roughly 12 weeks between a sale being agreed and moving in, although the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) now puts the average at 120 days from offer acceptance.
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Who does the work, and what to look for
Three kinds of professional are qualified to do conveyancing: solicitors, licensed conveyancers, and chartered legal executives. All three are regulated and insured, and you can confirm any firm’s regulator through Legal Choices, the site run jointly by the legal regulators. Doing it yourself is legal but almost never sensible if you are borrowing.
| Professional | Regulated by | Scope | Best suited to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licensed conveyancer | Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC) | Property law specialist only | Straightforward purchases and sales |
| Solicitor | Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) | Full legal practice including property | Anything with complications, disputes or probate |
| Chartered legal executive | CILEx Regulation | Qualified in a chosen specialism, often conveyancing | Routine transactions, often within a larger firm |
| Firm on your lender’s panel | SRA, CLC or CILEx Regulation | As above, plus approved to act for your lender | Anyone buying with a mortgage |
| Doing it yourself | Not regulated | Legally possible, practically difficult | Cash purchases only, and rarely advisable |
For a normal purchase there is no meaningful difference between them. All are qualified, all must carry indemnity insurance, and all owe you a duty to take reasonable care. A solicitor becomes the better choice where the transaction touches something outside pure property work: a probate sale, a divorce, a boundary dispute, or a title with an oddity in it.
If you have a mortgage, the firm generally needs to sit on your lender’s approved panel, because they will be acting for the lender as well as for you. Instruct a firm that is not on the panel and the lender appoints its own. You then pay twice.
Location makes no legal difference in England and Wales. Any regulated firm can act anywhere, so choosing local for its own sake narrows the field without gaining you anything. Responsiveness matters far more, because the commonest cause of a slow transaction is a firm that does not chase.
What is actually being checked
Three things: that the seller owns what they are selling and can transfer it, that nothing attached to the property will cause you a problem, and that nothing planned nearby will spoil your use of it. GOV.UK’s How to Sell a Home guide defines local authority searches as the information the council holds on a property and the area around it.
- Title. The register and title plan at HM Land Registry, showing who owns the property, where the boundaries run, and anything registered against it such as a mortgage.
- Rights and restrictions. Easements giving neighbours a right of way, covenants limiting what you can build or do, and any shared access or maintenance obligation.
- Local authority search. Planning decisions, whether the roads are adopted or privately maintained, enforcement notices, tree preservation orders and conservation area status.
- Environmental search. Contamination history, flood risk and ground stability.
- Water and drainage search. Where the drains run, who maintains them, and whether a public sewer crosses the land.
- Property Information Form (TA6). The seller’s own written disclosures on disputes, alterations, guarantees and flooding. These bind them in a way that a chat during a viewing does not.
- Fittings and Contents Form (TA10). What is included in the sale and what is going in the seller’s van.
Leasehold adds a layer, and a leasehold information form (TA7) with it. The lease has to be read and reported on, and a management pack obtained from the freeholder or managing agent covering service charges, ground rent, planned major works and the accounts. That pack is frequently the slowest single item in a leasehold purchase, because the timescale sits with a third party nobody in the chain can compel.
One number is worth checking before you fall in love with a flat. GOV.UK warns that a lease with fewer than 80 years left may need extending before a sale, and that some lenders are reluctant to lend against one. Find that out at the viewing, not at week nine.
The stages, and where the time goes
Enquiries is the stage that takes the most time. Your conveyancer raises questions arising from the contract, the searches and the seller’s forms, and each round trip to the other side can take a week or more. MHCLG’s home buying and selling reform consultation puts the average transaction at 120 days from offer acceptance to completion.
Instruction and identity checks take a few days. You provide identification and proof of address, the source of your deposit is verified under anti-money laundering rules, and an initial payment covers the searches.
Searches and draft contract follow immediately. The local authority search governs the timetable here, and council turnaround varies from a few days to several weeks. Ask which council and what its current turnaround is. That one number tells you more about your likely timeline than any average will.
Enquiries is open-ended by nature. A clean title on a modern house generates few questions. A property with an unregistered extension, an unclear boundary or a missing building regulations certificate generates several rounds, and every one of them waits on somebody else.
Exchange of contracts is the moment the transaction becomes legally binding and the completion date is fixed. Before it, either side can walk away. After it, they cannot without serious financial consequence. Our guide to exchange of contracts covers what happens at that point in detail.
Completion and registration closes it. Money transfers, keys are released, the property tax return is filed, and HM Land Registry updates the register. The tax is Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) in England and Northern Ireland, Land Transaction Tax (LTT) in Wales and Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (LBTT) in Scotland. Registration happens after you have moved in, and a delay at the registry end affects neither your ownership nor your right to live there.
Why the timetable has stretched
Conveyancing genuinely takes longer than it used to. MHCLG’s home buying and selling reform consultation reports that the conveyancing stage took around 60% longer in 2025 than in 2007, and that roughly one transaction in three now fails before completion, costing buyers and sellers about £400 million a year between them.
The department attributes the slowdown to two things in particular. Anti-money laundering rules have multiplied identity checks, so the same buyer is verified separately by the estate agent, the conveyancer and the lender. And titles themselves have grown more complicated, with managed freeholds and estate rent charges now common enough that lenders impose extra requirements on the conveyancer to cover their own risk.
This is why an average is a poor planning tool. Your transaction is not the average, it is your council’s search queue plus your seller’s paperwork plus the slowest firm in your chain. If you want a figure to hold on to, hold on to the one you can actually find out: the search turnaround where you are buying.
Reform is in progress rather than in force. The government has consulted on requiring sellers to provide upfront information packs including searches, on making agreements binding earlier, and on digital property logbooks. Pilots that simply ordered searches at the point of instruction rather than later ran about four weeks faster than average, which gives some sense of how much of the delay is sequencing rather than substance.
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What you can do to speed it up
Most delay is not caused by your own solicitor. It is caused by waiting on councils, managing agents, lenders and the other side. The parts you control are your paperwork, your responsiveness and instructing early. GOV.UK’s How to Sell a Home guide recommends gathering identification, title documents, certificates and guarantees before you are asked for them.
Instruct as soon as an offer is accepted rather than waiting for the estate agent to chase you. A week lost at the start is a week lost at the end, and it is the cheapest week you will ever save.
Have identification and proof of funds ready in advance. Passport or driving licence, proof of address dated within the last three months, and bank statements showing where the deposit came from. Gifted deposits need a letter from the donor plus their own identification, and this is a routine cause of a fortnight’s delay simply because nobody warns families in advance.
If you are selling, fill in the TA6 and TA10 forms properly and early. Vague or blank answers generate enquiries, and every enquiry is a round trip. Dig out the guarantees, building regulations certificates and planning permissions for anything that has been done to the property while you owned it.
Then chase weekly, politely and in writing, and ask one specific question: what is outstanding, and who is it with? That is far more useful than asking for an update, because it tells you immediately whether the delay is yours to solve or somebody else’s.
The words you will see, translated
Most of the confusion in conveyancing is vocabulary rather than complexity. A handful of terms carry the whole process, and knowing them makes the correspondence readable. GOV.UK’s How to Sell a Home guide carries a full glossary of the official terms.
- Title. The legal ownership record held at HM Land Registry, made up of the register and the title plan.
- Freehold. You own the building and the land it stands on, indefinitely.
- Leasehold. You own the right to occupy for a fixed number of years under a lease, with a freeholder above you.
- Covenant. An obligation attached to the property, either requiring something or forbidding it, which binds whoever owns it.
- Easement. A right over someone else’s land, such as a right of way or a right to run a drain.
- Disbursement. A third-party cost your conveyancer pays on your behalf, such as a search fee.
- Sold subject to contract. An offer has been accepted but nothing is binding yet.
- Requisitions on title. Final pre-completion questions confirming nothing has changed.
- Completion statement. The closing account showing what you owe and what is being paid out on your behalf.
- Indemnity insurance. A policy covering a legal defect that cannot be resolved quickly, or at all.
Indemnity insurance deserves a note, because it is offered more often than people expect and widely misunderstood. It covers the financial consequence of a legal defect, such as a council acting over work done without building regulations approval. It does not cover the quality of the work itself, and it does not make the problem go away. It is a way of pricing a risk so a transaction can proceed, which is often sensible and occasionally a way of avoiding something you should have looked at properly.
Where the process differs across the UK
Scotland runs a different system, and guidance written for England does not transfer. As mygov.scot’s conveyancing guide sets out, the contract is formed by missives before conveyancing begins, which is the reverse of the English sequence where the legal work leads up to exchange.
| Point | England and Wales | Scotland | Northern Ireland |
|---|---|---|---|
| Point of commitment | Exchange of contracts | Conclusion of missives, much earlier | Exchange of contracts |
| Survey | Buyer commissions their own | Seller provides a Home Report before marketing | Buyer commissions their own |
| Offers | Made through the estate agent | Made formally through solicitors | Through the agent |
| Fall-through risk | Around 1 in 3 transactions | Around 9% | Comparable to England and Wales |
| Property tax | SDLT in England, LTT in Wales | LBTT | SDLT |
Two differences matter most if you are moving between nations. Scottish buyers commit far earlier, which removes most of the gazumping risk, but it also removes the window to renegotiate on a survey, because the Home Report is already on the table when the offer is made.
The effect shows up in the failure rate. MHCLG cites a fall-through rate of about 9% in Scotland against roughly one in three across the wider UK market, and attributes the gap partly to those earlier binding agreements. It is the single strongest argument in the reform consultation, and the reason binding conditional contracts are on the table for England.
Scottish solicitors also frequently act as estate agents, so fee structures bundle marketing and legal work in a way that has no English equivalent. Comparing quotes line by line across the border does not work.
This is general information rather than legal advice. Take advice from a regulated professional on your own transaction.
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A note on what conveyancing does not cover, because the boundary catches people out. Your conveyancer deals with the legal title and the paperwork. They do not inspect the building, value it, or comment on its condition. That is the surveyor’s job, a separate instruction with a separate fee. A conveyancer will report that a property is legally sound while the roof is at the end of its life, and both statements can be perfectly true.
Nor do they check that the fixtures listed as included are actually present on completion day. The TA10 form is a contractual document, but verifying it is on you at the final inspection, which is one good reason to view the property empty before completing if the seller will allow it.
When to worry, and when not to
Weeks of apparent silence are normal and not a sign anything is wrong. What is worth acting on is a firm that will not tell you what is outstanding. GOV.UK’s How to Sell a Home guide sets out the escalation route: use the firm’s own complaints procedure first, then the Legal Ombudsman if the final response does not satisfy you.
Buyers routinely panic somewhere around weeks four to eight, which is precisely when the process looks dormant from the outside while enquiries circulate. Knowing that is worth more than chasing daily.
Genuine warning signs look different. A conveyancer who cannot name what is outstanding. Repeated failure to return calls over weeks. An estimate that has quietly grown into a much larger bill. A seller’s side that goes silent on a specific enquiry for a fortnight without explanation. Any of those is worth escalating.
And one discipline prevents most of the expensive mistakes made around moving dates: do not book removals or give notice on a rental before exchange. Everything ahead of exchange can collapse, and with roughly a third of transactions failing, a completion date that is not yet binding is an intention rather than a commitment.
On cost, MHCLG’s consultation put average conveyancing fees at around £1,540 for buyers and £930 for sellers. Treat that as an indicative market figure published in the October 2025 consultation and updated in June 2026, not a quote. For the full picture, including the third-party charges that sit on top of the legal fee, see our breakdown of conveyancing fees.
How EcoGreen Movers fits into the timeline
Because the moving date is fixed at exchange and is often only two to four weeks ahead, removals bookings get made under time pressure. EcoGreen Movers quotes on a fixed basis and holds dates through the usual turbulence of a chain, using reusable crates rather than disposable cardboard.
Two to four weeks is enough for any of the three service levels provided the decision is already made. Standard is the loading and unloading, Standard Plus adds the furniture taken apart and rebuilt, and Premium adds professional packing, which is the one that genuinely rescues a short notice period. Packing boxes are sold on their own, and buying them during the enquiries stage costs nothing in wasted time even if the transaction slows. Storage covers the case where completion dates in a chain refuse to align.
We handle residential moves across the UK, including London, Manchester and Edinburgh. For the day itself, see our guide to completion day, or get in touch for a quote.
Frequently asked questions
How long does conveyancing take?
GOV.UK’s guidance allows roughly 12 weeks between a sale being agreed and moving in, while MHCLG’s 2026 reform consultation puts the actual average at 120 days from offer acceptance. Leasehold purchases and long chains run longer. The local authority search and the enquiries stage account for most of the variation, and both depend on third parties rather than on your own solicitor.
Solicitor, licensed conveyancer or chartered legal executive?
Any of the three. All are regulated and insured, and for a normal transaction there is no practical difference. A solicitor is the better choice where the sale involves probate, divorce, a dispute or an unusual title, because those sit outside a property specialist’s usual ground.
Can I do my own conveyancing?
Legally yes on a cash purchase. HM Land Registry publishes procedural guidance on transfers and says so directly, while also warning that there is far more to a transaction than filling in its forms, and that searches and enquiries missed at the time cause serious problems afterwards. A lender will not accept it if you have a mortgage, and the risk sits entirely with you.
At what point am I legally committed?
At exchange of contracts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Before that, either side can withdraw and lose only the costs already incurred. In Scotland commitment comes much earlier, at conclusion of missives, which is why the two systems feel so different to go through.
Why does leasehold conveyancing take longer?
The lease must be read and reported on, and a management pack obtained from the freeholder or managing agent covering service charges, ground rent and planned major works. That pack’s timescale sits with a third party nobody in the transaction can compel. A lease with fewer than 80 years remaining adds a further complication, since it may need extending and some lenders will not lend against it.
Is the conveyancing process about to change?
Possibly, but not yet. MHCLG has consulted on requiring sellers to provide upfront information including searches and a condition report, on binding agreements earlier in the process, and on digital property packs. None of it is law, and the department has said the binding-contract proposals need further consultation before anything happens.
In summary: three checks and one binding moment
Conveyancing confirms that the seller can sell, that nothing attached to the property will catch you out, and that nothing planned nearby will spoil it. Instruct a regulated firm early, get your identification and proof of funds ready before anybody asks, and chase by asking what is outstanding and with whom.
Nothing is binding until exchange, so make no irreversible commitments before it. After exchange the date is fixed, and that is the point to book the van.
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