Conveyancing

Based on my experience and my late father in laws don’t use the recommended one, they are just there as the agent is getting a bung. We have always used a reputable local solicitor rather than some faceless company, ymmv.

As above, When buying rather than selling, I used a local firm. Thier prices were just as competetive as the online solicitor warehouses and were pretty good as solicitors go.

YMMV though, but if they are local to you, it can save a bit of hassle, and also if they start dragging thier feet you can go to the office and pester them.

A decent company will give you a firm quote for everything after a free consultation, so there shouldn't be any hidden costs unless something goes really pear shaped...

Conveyancy is a pretty straight forward process, albiet a little nitty gritty asthere's lots of little things that need to be done PROPERLY, despite how it may appear to the layman.

Do not under any circumstances use O'Neill Patient Solicitors.

Another vote for good local solicitors.

Do not under any circumstances use O’Neill Patient Solicitors.

This x100

They were so bad during my house purchase (seller was using them) that my solicitor reported them to the law council due to mistakes and lack of communication.

Lots of local solicitors are not good as well. Best go for recommendations imho. We sold my folks' house and the buyers used a local setup.

They didn't use email.

This was 2 years ago. Horrendous to sort things out by memo. This was chain-free as well. Took a week to sort any query out. We agreed the deal in mid December, they sat on the case till end - Jan.

We used the estate agents recommendation, and they were actually good-to-great! Called when they said they would, gave more info when asked etc etc. It's a chain in NW England. If that's useful to you I'll tell you the name.

Edit to add. We did once use a firm of specialist conveyancers to buy our current house. The owner of the company was our contact. He was amazing. Like proper amazing! Sadly doesn't do the job any more. But a company who does this sort of thing would also be a recommendation.

Based on my experience and my late father in laws don’t use the recommended one, they are just there as the agent is getting a bung. We have always used a reputable local solicitor rather than some faceless company, ymmv.

Totally this. My previous employer was a large specialist conveyancing firm. The level of the junior (and some senior) conveyancers made me shudder.

You are much better off having a proper relationship than a computer-driven checklist.

Where are you, perhaps someone can suggest someone?

Do not under any circumstances use O’Neill Patient Solicitors.

The ones in Stockport? They’ve gone seriously downhill if its the same place, they were brilliant for me 8 or so years back.

OP

another vote for a good local place that you can actually go to and speak to them if needed..

I will add - do not use Oliver and Co.

We used them for a sale and purchase and, genuinely, I have never been so stressed. They were absolutely, utterly, terrible, and at one point went into complete radio silence for two weeks - neither me, the estate agents or the vendor's solicitor could get a word out of them. The sale nearly fell through a couple of times as the vendors got so, understandably, f___d off, and at one point I had to ring their solicitor direct as no-one could get any response from mine. He said that it was the worst firm he'd ever dealt with.

We used O'Neill last year for staircasing and lease extension and had no issues with them at all.

I did get into the habit of once a week just dropping an email "Update please" and always got progress back.

We will actually be using them again shortly as we're about to sell.

We used the same solicitor for the sale of ours and purchase of our new house - recommended by our estate agent. I think the problem is more with developers solicitors (the big developers) rather than estate agent recommendations. At the end of the day it's in the estate agents interest to make sure sales go through quickly and smoothly.

So if you are in the East Midlands I can recommend Simpson Jones. Elly who dealt with ours was bob-on.
https://www.simpsonjones.com/

And yes - stay local - there WILL be something you have to go in to sign or a document to drop off! 🙂

O'Neill's have been appalling for my sister. There's been many many failures, one of my favourites being they requested a grant of probate. I sent it on behalf of my sister, fully expecting them to say "it's not a certified copy." It was... I took photos of it for my own piece of mind before posting it. Low and behold, week later, "it's not a certified copy." Many emails and phone calls back and forth, they sent a scan of the document saying "look, it's not certified." The problem being they were looking at the scan, if they just looked at the original copy, they would see the stamp which wasn't picked up on the scan. But their process is too receive documents in the post room, scan and send to the solicitor and destroy the original. That wasted about a month.

After 6+ months the whole thing fell through because they'd never reviewed the deeds which they'd sat on for 6 months. Just sent an email on a Friday pm saying "we can no longer proceed, but thanks for choosing us." That was it. Awful customer service.

I used O'Neill's about 13 years ago for the purchase of a proportion of shared ownership flat, and it all went fine. Upon looking through email subsequently, they then were 'introduced' to me a few times by banks when I re-mortgaged, and on at least one occasion (staircasing I think) I used other solicitors at my own expense as apparently O'Neill had been so useless for a friend of mine that they'd lost a property they were trying to buy.

However I then ended up using them again for a re-mortgage (not sure how!) and the emails there show them to have made several mistakes which we had to correct, at least one of which that would have cost us tens of thousands of pounds in early repayment fees.

I've used another couple of firms as well and they were fine, but I hesitate to make recommendations here as it's almost inevitable someone else will have had their cat set on fire by them or similar!