4 May 2019

Searches – Why We Are Uniting Agents And Conveyancers Across Derby…

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This week (published 4th May 2019) we have been making news in the property world by getting together with prominent local agents and conveyancers to voice our concerns about the turnaround time for local authority searches in our city.

If you are familiar with the home-buying process, you will no doubt be well aware of the importance of searches being issued in a timely manner and the cost and delay that results when they aren’t, if you are new to the process, a brief explanation of property searches can be found below.

Property searches are enquiries made by your conveyancers to find out more information about the property you intend to purchase and as part of the home-buying process your conveyancer will carry out a variety of searches with the local authority and other sources.

The main searches which apply when buying a property are:

 

 

Additional searches are often applied for in conjunction with the searches above and can include things such as mining searches if mining activity may have taken place in or around the area of the property that you are purchasing. These additional searches will vary depending on location. You can find out more about searches by clicking HERE.

In order to protect you from purchasing a property that may have issues in the future conveyancers will not usually progress the purchase of a property until they receive the results of these searches, and herein lies the issue.

Our research has shown that Derby City Council is taking 44 working days – almost nine weeks – to issue searches and this is continuing to rise weekly (as of the 21/8/19 this has now improved to 24 working days for new searches as per figures provided by Derby City Council)

This turnaround time is delaying transactions across Derby and leading to all kinds of complications for home movers, from an increase in property sales falling through to home buyers missing out on their dream home or getting their children into their preferred school catchment.

We believe this simply isn’t acceptable for our clients so we are reaching out to local agents and conveyancing practice owners to unite as a collective to try and resolve the issue with Derby City Council searches.

An initial meeting was scheduled for Thursday the 2nd of May and was attended by a variety of firms from across Derby who all want to work together to improve the home buying process for everyone involved.

We hope to continue our work towards improving the home buying process and will make every effort to work with local agents, conveyancers and Derby City Council to allow us to continue to deliver the high quality service that our customers have come to expect from the Complete Moving Experience.

If you want to keep up to date on progress, you can find the latest news stories on our Hannells homepage or you can click the ‘News’ tab.

If you need any help or advice with any aspect of buying, selling or renting a property, just contact your local Hannells branch or click HERE.

 

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