When you buy or sell a house you will want to save as much money as you can in every way, one of the places where you can either save or lose is finding the right solicitor or conveyance for your property. We recently sold our house through Haart and were ‘sold’ on their conveyance package but before we did decide we got around 5 quotes to see what other firms were offering.

It’s always important to shop around as you may save hundreds just by taking the time to do so, to sell my 3 bedroom house the quotes ranged from £700 to £1,200 including VAT. Obviously it is tempting to go with the cheapest but that isn’t necessarily the wisest choice. As we were leaving to live abroad we needed a reliable conveyance and also one that wasn’t too expensive. Also if the sale was to not go through you still need to pay.

Haart solicitors operate a ‘no sale, no fee’ guarantee and as we already lost some money on the sale of the house we decided to go ahead just in case we lose more money. You have to pay a £60 admin fee and if the sale doesn’t go through that is all you will lose, you won’t have to pay a penny more. Unfortunately it is very misleading and this is how it really works.

Haart solicitors / conveyances
When you ‘go’ with Haarts’ solicitors you are actually paying Haart a £60 admin fee to find a solicitor / conveyance for you and none of that £60 goes to the conveyance. Also as our quotes was £750 only £300 of that actually goes to the conveyancing team, the remainder £450 goes to Haart. So on top of paying Haart £4000 when the house sells they actually get more money if you go with ‘their’ conveyancing team.

It is also misleading as there are other charges to pay, it is supposed to be all inclusive for money transferring, title deeds name transfer, land registry checks etc but it not and these charges will be added on to the supposedly ‘all inclusive’ fee.

They are very slow to start the process too as we had to fax the starter pack twice and then post it, in all we have lost around a month because of lack of organisation and poor estate agents who haven’t a clue what they are doing.

So if you do decide to go with them be aware that there are ‘hidden’ charges and also you may find that the whole process is up to 2 months longer than most other places.