You should really instruct your solicitor as soon as your offer has been accepted. Your solicitor can then be moving ahead with getting on with the paperwork and searches, etc.

If you delay instructing your solicitor until you have received a survey report or a mortgage offer this may cause delay and, perhaps more importantly, may lead to the estate agent or the seller to believe that you are not getting on with things and therefore prejudice the transaction.

If you are obtaining a mortgage your bank or building society will normally insist that you pay for a mortgage valuation, which is the most basic kind of survey, more or less consisting of a cursory inspection of the property and an assessment of its present market value.

Many people consider that this basic inspection of the property is insufficient to protect their investment and choose to additionally pay for their own survey. Depending on the nature of the transaction it is normally best to wait until your solicitor has received a draft contract before instructing the surveyor, which is a sign at least of a basic commitment on the part of the seller although even then there is no guarantee that the deal will go through.

Before exchange of contracts it is usual to undertake a local search. There are sometimes other less common searches which are carried out depending on the location of the property.

• The local search is a check at the local authority as to any information that may be recorded against the property and would reveal, amongst other things, its planning history, whether there are any road schemes or compulsory purchase orders affecting the property and matters of a similar nature.
• There are considerable difficulties with some local councils where the turnaround times for processing local searches have become unacceptably long. Recognising that most of our clients will be unhappy to see their proposed purchase delayed we now use a personal search agency, PSG The searches carried out by PSG are usually slightly less expensive than the fees charged by the council and nearly always quicker.
• The environmental search is a relatively new type of search and is conducted on line (the result is normally obtained within a few minutes), and provides an indication as to the recorded uses of the land shown on official maps of the vicinity. It includes an assessment as to the likelihood of serious quantities of contamination in the land around the property and of the flood risk of properties in the area. It does not however involve any soil testing or other physical inspection.
• A planning search is a search in the immediate vicinity of the property for any planning permissions affecting adjoining or nearby properties. You may wish such a search to be carried out as the local search will produce information only for your particular property and not for planning applications in the vicinity.
• Since the introduction of Home Information Packs it is now very common for the Local Authority and also water / drainage searches to be included in the Home Information Pack at the expense of the seller.

It is not our policy to carry out an environmental search or a planning search as a matter of course. If you do require either or both of these searches to be carried out please let us know.

• In some areas it may be necessary to carry out a coal mining search to check whether the property is affected by subsidence due to mining.
• In certain rural locations it may be advisable to carry out a Commons Registration search. This identifies whether any land in the area is common land and therefore subject to certain public rights of way.

Most residential conveyancing contracts require 10% of the purchase price to be paid when the contracts are exchanged. If you are also simultaneously selling a property it is usual to use the deposit that is received on your sale as the deposit on your purchase and to request that the seller accepts this even if it is less than 10%. However a seller will not normally accept less than 5% and the contract will normally require that the balance of a 10% deposit is paid if you do not complete the purchase on the due date.

If you are obtaining a 95% or more mortgage the seller may be advised to accept a 5% deposit on exchange of contracts.

It is not normally advisable to pay any deposit until exchange of contracts and any money should go through the solicitor. It is sometimes necessary to pay a small reservation deposit e.g. when buying a new property from a developer but you should ensure that this is refundable if you pull out.

There are some very sophisticated stamp duty saving schemes which are sometimes used in very high value transactions. There is not really any way to reduce stamp duty in general and the Government have recently tightened up. However a simple way to reduce the duty (which applies to transactions of more than £125,000 or in certain special areas over £150,000) is if part of the price can legitimately be apportioned (allocated) to fittings or contents. This can be particularly useful if the price is just over one of the stamp duty bands, i.e. £125,000/£250,000/£500,000 or if the price is in one of the higher bands. The amount must be agreed with the seller and be reasonable and realistic. It may be helpful to agree a list of relevant items, and if possible for the seller to let you have some proof of the value of the items such as receipts. Your lender (if applicable) may need to be notified that the price for the property itself has been reduced but in most cases this will not affect the terms of the mortgage offer.

Inevitably if there are a number of people looking to buy and sell simultaneously, any delay in relation to any one of the transactions will prevent everyone else from exchanging contracts. If you do find yourself in a chain it is always sensible to try to find out at the beginning of the transaction the position of the other parties in the chain, and to try to monitor the progress made by each person as the transaction progresses. You should ask your agent to do this for you.

Unfortunately, there is a lot more work involved in leasehold Conveyancing . Leases are complex and usually lengthy documents often many years old, which need to be carefully studied to check that they are satisfactory and that they meet present mortgage company requirements. The Council of Mortgage Lenders in recent years has laid down a stringent set of criteria that all residential leases must meet and if they do not they are considered defective and remedial action will have to be taken by the solicitors involved in order for the sale to proceed, normally putting the seller to some expense.

In addition, because service charges and ground rents are usually payable under the terms of the lease,the present level of service charges, future charges and other matters such as buildings insurance need to be carefully checked.

The period between exchange and completion is there for a good reason in that until exchange of contracts the transaction is not binding on either party. Obviously arrangements need to be made to move including packing, notifying changes of address and, in particular, arranging removals. Although it is possible to exchange and complete on the same day if the preparatory work is done, this gives rise to the possibility that someone will change their mind or fail to meet the completion date and there will be no liability on that person as there has been no exchange of contracts. Therefore by exchanging and completing on the same day, you are taking a large risk that you will be disappointed on the proposed moving day if your seller or somebody further up the chain of transactions is unable or unwilling to move.

There are effectively only two ways of dealing with this and that is to persuade the seller's solicitor exchange contracts without a deposit or with a nominal deposit, or alternatively to proceed with a simultaneous exchange and completion (see above). The seller is more likely to accept the solution of a simultaneous exchange and completion if there is no chain of transactions or a very short chain.

In many cases although all your work has been completed by your solicitor and contract signed, the transaction is unable to proceed because somebody elsewhere in the chain of transactions is encountering a delay. Unfortunately, your solicitors are powerless to change this situation as a delay elsewhere in the chain is entirely beyond our control. We will, however, do all in our power to keep in touch with the relevant estate agents and solicitors until the delay is resolved.

Sometimes such delays are caused by inefficiency or problems in the solicitor's office and on other occasions they are caused by the other parties to the transaction not instructing their solicitor properly. If this sort of delay occurs you can help by either contacting your seller direct and asking him to press his solicitor, or contacting the seller through the estate agents and reporting back any response to your solicitor.

For complicated legal reasons which are beyond the scope of this guide, all flats or maisonettes have to be leasehold. When a flat is advertised as freehold what this generally means is that the freehold of the block or building of which the flat forms a part is owned either by the occupiers of the flats or, more usually, by a company which is owned by the occupiers of the flats.

This is obviously beneficial in that it means that you will have a share in the decisions regarding the maintenance and repair of the properties and will be able to extend your lease, if required.

Leases are usually acceptable security for mortgage purposes if there are 25 years left on the lease after the end of the mortgage. Typically, therefore, leases over 50 years for the normal 25 year mortgage would be acceptable as security for the mortgagee.

However, the value and acceptability of leases has an affect on the value of the property once the lease gets below, say, 75 years. For a lease below that time there are a number of purchasers who would not be happy with the length of the lease and wish there to be an extension. This problem obviously gets worse the shorter the lease becomes and certainly when the lease is less than 70 years there is a marketability issue. Guide to short leases

On some occasions what your solicitor needs to communicate to you is very important or may involve looking at plans or other documents. In these circumstances it is, in our opinion, sometimes better to have a written communication to avoid misunderstanding.

The good news is that you will not be liable for any costs incurred by the seller if contracts have not been exchanged.

Not so good news is, of course, that you may have incurred some fees yourself, namely survey fees,search fees and some legal costs.

This firm will keep abortive legal costs to a minimum. Obviously, if you are doubtful about the transaction,the earlier that you pull out of the transaction the lower your expenses will be.

Unfortunately, after exchange of contracts there exists a legally binding agreement and if you were to withdraw you would be liable for very considerable expense including losing your deposit. Even if your deposit is less than 10% the contract provides that you are liable to pay the seller a full 10%. In addition,you could be liable for additional expenses according to whether the seller then has to sell the property at a reduced price. This is a particular danger in an environment of falling property prices.

The short answer is, therefore, you must not withdraw from the transaction after you have exchanged.

It is, unfortunately, not possible to give a definite time. If you do not have a property to sell then generally the keys should be available by mid morning. If, however, you do have a property to sell then the time that you will receive the keys is entirely dependent upon the time the money is received on your sale as obviously this incoming money will be required before your solicitor can send the money required to complete your purchase to your seller's solicitor.

This firm has its own CHAPS terminal which gives us access direct into the banking system. This means that we can receive and transmit funds without the involvement of any bank staff thus speeding up the process.

If you are obtaining a mortgage, as solicitors we act not only for you as our client but also for the bank or building society lending the money. Banks or building societies have certain requirements that they insist on being met in connection with legal documentation. In some cases, therefore, even though a problem has arisen and you are prepared to take it on board, it may be that this is not possible for your solicitor in view of the requirements of the lender.