Conveyancing explained: the legal side of moving home

Conveyancing is the legal process of transferring ownership of property from one person to another, and in England and Wales it is more involved than the simple act of paying and picking up the keys suggests. Property law here does not let money and ownership change hands informally; there is a formal sequence that must be followed to make the transfer valid and to protect the buyer from inheriting problems they cannot see. That work is done by a conveyancer, either a solicitor or a licensed conveyancer, acting for the buyer, with another acting for the seller.

Much of the early work is investigation. The seller’s conveyancer supplies a draft contract along with the title information and forms describing the property, and the buyer’s conveyancer scrutinises them and raises enquiries about anything unclear. Alongside this come searches, formal enquiries to third parties that reveal things a physical viewing cannot: a local authority search on planning history, road schemes and charges affecting the property; environmental searches on flood risk and contamination; and water and drainage searches on how the property connects to the mains. The point of all of it is to establish exactly what is being bought and whether anything about it should give the buyer pause.

The transaction turns on two distinct moments that are easy to confuse. The first is exchange of contracts, when the signed contracts are formally swapped and a completion date is fixed. Exchange is the point of no return: from that moment the deal is legally binding, the buyer typically pays a deposit, and a party who pulls out afterwards faces serious financial consequences. Until exchange, by contrast, either side can walk away, which is why sales can and do collapse late in the day without legal liability. The second moment is completion, on the agreed date, when the balance of the price is transferred, ownership passes and the buyer can collect the keys and move in.

Two further steps fall to the buyer’s conveyancer around completion, and both matter. Stamp Duty Land Tax is a tax the buyer pays on purchases above the relevant thresholds, and the conveyancer normally files the return to HMRC and pays it on the buyer’s behalf shortly after completion. The rates, thresholds and reliefs change from time to time and vary with the buyer’s circumstances, so the current position should always be checked against the official guidance rather than assumed. Then the conveyancer registers the new owner with HM Land Registry, updating the official record of who owns the property, which can itself take some weeks or longer.

For most people a house is the largest thing they will ever buy, and conveyancing is the safeguard that stops that purchase going wrong in ways that would be ruinous to unpick later. It can feel slow and opaque while it is happening, a stream of forms and enquiries with long silences in between, but each stage is doing a job: proving the seller can sell, uncovering hidden burdens, fixing the moment the deal becomes binding, and recording the result so the buyer’s ownership is secure. Understanding the sequence, and in particular that exchange, not the offer, is the point of commitment, takes a good deal of the anxiety out of it.