Conveyancing Explained

July 11, 2008

One of the questions I’m most often asked is, what time can I move in?

Unfortunately, the answer is not usually what my clients want to hear!

The difficulty is that technically, keys should not be handed over until the seller’s solicitor has received the purchase monies into their client account. Your solicitor needs to have the mortgage monies and any balance from you, together with the monies on any property you might be selling at the same time. Only then can he send a payment request to his bank for the purchase monies to be sent to the seller’s solicitors.

Once your solicitor’s bankers have received the request, it will usually be processed electronically in a queuing system. At this point, the time it takes is out of your solicitor’s hands, it is solely down to how busy the bank are, how many other payments are going through on that day and whereabouts your payment request is in the queue.

This always causes problems for buyers, because they don’t want to hire a removal van for longer than absolutely necessary. As a general rule, if your solicitor has got the mortgage monies in his client account the day before, which I like to do as a matter of good practice but in fairness not every mortgage lender will allow this, then you can probably expect the monies to go through early in the morning from 11am onwards. If you’re also selling a property though, bear in mind that your buyer’s solicitor has to go through the same process to get the money to you, hence the usual delays.

Its best to ask your solicitor whether or not he can get the mortgage money the day before, because at least then, you’re not waiting for this to come through as well as any sale money on your existing property. Also, if you want to complete early, avoid popular days such as the Friday before any bank holiday, because the banking system is always manic!