How conveyancing works
Here are the ten steps to conveyancing when buying a house.
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📝 1. Sign up
The first thing is to tell us about you and the place you’re buying, and do your ID checks. With Juno you can do all this online.
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🏦 2. Mortgage and funding
Unless you’ve got the money to buy the property outright, you’ll need a mortgage offer. We’ll ask you to verify how you’re paying for the purchase – most people provide bank statements – we’ll walk you through it.
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📗 3. Search reports
Our standard pack includes:
- Local authority search report — shows whether the property has planning and building regulations approvals, and whether the council maintains the road outside.
- Water and drainage search report — shows whether the property is officially connected to mains water and sewers.
- Environmental search report — shows whether the ground is contaminated, unstable, or likely to flood.
- Chancel liability insurance — covers you in case a church uses an ancient law to get you to pay their repair bills.
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📑 4. Contract pack
The seller’s lawyer sends us a draft contract, the Land Registry records for the property, and a pack of information provided by the seller. If there’s a management company, the seller’s lawyer will also get their pack and forward it on to us.
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🏡 5. Survey
We recommend all our clients get a survey — and this is in addition to any mortgage valuation. We’ll check the things your surveyor says to check with your legal advisor.
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🙋 6. Enquiries
We ask the seller’s lawyer to clarify and/or fix any legal issues with the property. Sometimes we also need input from your mortgage lender or the management company. It usually takes a few weeks to resolve all the enquiries; leaseholds typically take a bit longer.
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📖 7. Report
We put everything we’ve found out into a report on the property, so you can proceed with confidence. If you’ve got any questions, now’s the time to ask them.
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🤝 8. Exchange
You and the seller have agreed the date you want to move, and signed your contracts in advance. We exchange contracts with the seller’s lawyer on a phone call. You’re committed to buying the property.
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🎉 9. Completion
It’s completion day! We transfer the rest of the money, you pick up the keys and the property is yours.
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✅ 10. Registration
We’ll register your purchase with the Land Registry. Their records will confirm your ownership so you won’t need to worry about keeping your deeds safe. Registration typically takes 6—12 weeks, but can take over a year for a new build property.