Sales and Purchases Many people are unsure of the exact procedure followed during a house sale and purchase. A brief outline of the legal side of your house move and how we can ensure the transaction goes smoothly, is set out below for your information. Once a sale has been agreed each party, the seller and the buyer, must instruct a conveyancer to act for them. Each side must have a different conveyancer, this ensures that you get independent, impartial advice. Due to money laundering regulations you will be asked to provide identification documents in order for us to begin work on your file. The seller's conveyancer will prepare the contract and send it to us. If we are acting for you in connection with a sale of a property, we will access a copy of your deeds direct from the Land Registry's web site to enable us to prepare contract documents quickly for submission to your buyer's conveyancer. If you are buying, we willl apply for a local authority search which reveals matters such as any proposed new road schemes, planning permissions and whether the roads are publicly maintained. Other searches are usually carried out including environmental and drainage searches. If you require any further searches to be made, for example a flood risk search or a plan search showing planning applications on neighbouring properties, we will be happy to carry out any additional searches or enquiries that you feel are necessary. All searches are commissioned electronically to ensure that there are no delays in this important first stage. As the buyer you will need to apply for a mortgage and the Bank or Building Society will instruct a surveyor to value the property. If you require a more detailed report, we can arrange this for you. You will be given an exclusive user name and password to give you access to track the progress of your matter via our website. We will then arrange to see you to go through all the documents and to sign contracts in readiness for exchange. This is the point when you will pay your deposit to us. Once the seller has signed his part of the contract and we have agreed a date for completion that is acceptable to you, contracts can be exchanged. On receipt of the whole of the sale monies, the keys will be released to you. After completion we will receive the deeds and then apply to register you as the new owner of the property. Remortgages There is no need to move to take advantage of a better interest rate with either a Bank or Building Society, you can re-mortgage to a different lending institution. This is where we can help. Once you have ascertained which 'deal' is best for you and you have made a mortgage application, the new lender will need our details. They will ask us to check that the title to your property is suitable for lending purposes. We will access a copy of your deeds direct from the Land Registry's web site. In most cases the mortgage lender will want us to re-apply for searches namely local search, drainage search and environmental search. All our searches are commissioned electronically to ensure that there are no delays in this important first stage. However, to save you money some lenders accept Search Indemnity Insurance at a fraction of the cost of re-applying for all the searches. If you require details of which lenders acceot Search Indemnity Insurance please ring and ask. Once you have received your new mortgage offer we will arrange to see you to sign the new documentation. A date can then be set for completing your re-mortgage. On this day we will pay off your existing mortgage and then account to you for any balance that may be left. We have the facility available to make a direct transfer to your bank account allowing you access to cleared funds on the day of completion.