Does my solicitor still have work to do after my property purchase is complete?

For the majority of buyers, their conveyancing transaction is complete on completion day (when they buy a property), or the day you move into your new home which is the day of completion. It represents the goal you have been striving towards and the end of all legal actions.

But in reality, your solicitors or conveyancer that cover your area still has job to do. Your solicitor will need to take care of tour Stamp Duty if owed and it must be paid to the If your Stamp Duty Land Tax is owed, we must pay it to the Inland Revenue and submit an online return. To accomplish this, confirm that the seller’s solicitor agent has provided the necessary signed legal documents, and then file it along with an Inland Revenue certificate.

Even if there is no tax due, a stamp duty return must be filled out and submitted with the necessary Land Registry documents for every real estate transaction. Because of this, it could take a while after you relocate into your new house before you get any paperwork proving that the home is registered by the owner of the the property.

In order to ensure that the Land Registry’s records are changed and the property is transferred into your name, your solicitor will send the request to the Land Registry on your behalf, together with any necessary documentation. You might be shocked to learn that there are still some unregistered homes in England and Wales that might require a different approach. The process of recording your ownership may also take longer if you are purchasing a new build because a first registration is required.

Once the paperwork has been submitted, your attorney has no control over the duration of the registration process. Due to staffing shortages caused by Covid, the Land Registry currently has a significant backlog. Despite the fact that this can be extremely discouraging, remember that you are still the legal proprietor of the property from the moment you received payment and the keys.

What occurs once the Land Registry updates its data?

An electronic copy of the completed registration will be delivered to you and, if applicable, your mortgage lender once your solicitor gets it from the Land Registry to establish that the title to the house is now in your name. The Land Registry will scan and destroy any original deeds or papers that are sent to them. If a copy of your deeds are required, you can always view the electronic versions of all records.

Your conveyancing solicitor will just require your address of which the property in your name, in order to receive the title number and a copy of the registered title if you decide to sell or refinance your home in the future.

It can be distressing that it takes many months to complete all of the paperwork necessary for a property acquisition, but unfortunately, this is the current trend. In the future, the Land Registry timetables should hopefully improve, enabling faster document delivery to ownership of the property.

Contact the attorney who handled your transaction if you have any worries about how long it will take to acquire your papers after a home complete the purchase. As they will be doing searches to safeguard the title and avoid any third party from submitting an application during the period of registration, they ought to be able to inform you of the most recent developments with the Land Registry application.