Property

Seven out of 10 conveyancing solicitors do not want the government to introduce mandatory binding contracts for offers to buy homes, research has found.

Transaction times will get “longer and longer” regardless of “how many new houses you build” because of the number of conveyancers leaving the market, MPs were told this week.

Stronger regulation of the “high-volume, low-value conveyancing sector”, as well as a review of fee structures, is needed as part of home-buying reform, the government has been told.

A “manifestly incompetent” solicitor who facilitated one fraudulent and three potentially fraudulent property transactions has been given a suspended suspension.

A conveyancing law firm only set up in May 2021 has been bought by private equity in a deal that values it at £25m.

Many property disputes “could be amenable to machine-made decision-making” in the future, the Master of the Rolls has predicted.

Most of the HM Land Registry customers will avoidable requisition rates of 20% or more are law firms, new figures have revealed.

An estate agency has been praised for publicly disavowing future demands for referral fees, describing them as “the quiet scandal” in the industry.

A digital property pack which combines multiple sources of data into a “single source of truth” for conveyancers and others has won a government prize worth £50,000.

Efforts to reduce the number of avoidable requisitions that the HM Land Registry has to make are working, new figures have shown.