"We have a 100% mortgage [such things existed back in the day]? How are we supposed to pay the 10% deposit on exchange exactly?"

“I’ve never seen this before and I’m sure there’s not a solution.” @ceona.bsky.social called the bank up and got it sorted in 5 mins

The average conveyancer makes no mistakes. Conveyancing Georg, who completes 10000 transactions a day and fucks them all up, is a statistical outlier and should not have been counted.

Flip side. I managed to get one of the £100 all-you-can-eat conveyancing services for a freehold interest that I needed to transfer out of my Dad’s estate twelve years after he died to one of my brothers who was the leaseholder of that property.

YOU COULD HAVE WARNED ME

The whole thing is very much you get what you pay for.

(putting it another way... the rule of thumb for solicitors and accountants is a third goes to overheads, 1/3 is the partners' cut and 1/3 goes to the staff wages)

(So on a £1k conveyancing fee, you're looking at £300 of actual wages)

A £30k wage is about £15 ph FTE, and that's very little above NMW these days.

once you factor in review, setting up the file, paperwork and dealing with queries, bodies, well, that's why anything out of the ordinary causes them to lose money, and which is why your sale (which always has something out of the ordinary) means that you have to call the buggers all the time.

My favourite was where we had a complex situation with my late brother and sister in law, we ended up going to 2 barristers to get opinions on stuff and then the solicitor just did the paperwork ignoring the barristers' opinion.

I can’t imagine many people going through a law degree dream of working in conveyancing.

‘The land and property your client says they’re selling is not the land and property shown in the documents. Perhaps you’d like to sort out what’s on sale’

I can’t imagine many people working in conveyancing dream of working in conveyancing.

He actually told me it was completely impossible that the bank would release money for our deposit on exchange. The bank were just "well of course we do, it's a 100% mortgage, how else would it work?"