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A solicitor selling your house drafts the contract pack, answers the buyer’s legal enquiries, manages the searches and coordinates exchange and completion, including redeeming your mortgage and registering the transfer with HM Land Registry. Most sales run 8 to 16 weeks from instruction to completion, and instructing a solicitor before you even list the property is the single biggest lever you have over that timeline.
The work starts before your property even hits the market. Your solicitor takes formal instructions, runs anti-money-laundering identity checks on everyone named on the title, and requests the official title documents from HM Land Registry. From there, the file moves through a fairly fixed sequence of legal and administrative tasks.
Your input matters more than most sellers expect. The TA6 and TA10 forms rely entirely on what you tell your solicitor, and vague or inaccurate answers tend to generate follow-up enquiries that eat into your timeline, as the Law Society notes in its guidance on selling a home. Turnaround on your side is usually the rate-limiting step, not your solicitor’s desk. If you can locate your paperwork before you’re asked for it, you strip out days that would otherwise be lost to back-and-forth emails.
Most sellers wait until they have an accepted offer before contacting a solicitor. That’s the point where delays start compounding. Pre-sale conveyancing, meaning your solicitor prepares the TA6, TA10 and title documents before your property is even marketed, is one of the most effective ways to cut the time to exchange and lower the risk of the sale collapsing later.
Instruct a solicitor as soon as you decide to sell, ideally at the same time you appoint an estate agent. Late instruction commonly adds two to three weeks because title checks, ID verification and form completion all have to happen from a standing start, right when a buyer is expecting movement.
Have these ready when you instruct:
The draft contract pack is what your solicitor sends to the buyer’s solicitor to kick off their due diligence, and it’s the single most important document set in the sale. Every item in it exists to answer a question the buyer’s solicitor will otherwise ask separately, which is exactly why gaps in it cost you time later.
You supply most of the raw information; your solicitor turns it into the formal pack and requests the HM Land Registry copies directly. Missing a certificate isn’t usually fatal. Your solicitor can typically arrange indemnity insurance to cover an absent building regulations certificate, or push for retrospective regularisation with the local authority, though the latter takes considerably longer. Standard document requests to HM Land Registry are usually quick, but a management pack from a leasehold freeholder can take several weeks, so flag leasehold status to your solicitor on day one, not once a buyer has been found.
Once the buyer’s solicitor has your contract pack, they raise a list of pre-contract enquiries. This is your solicitor’s opportunity to close down anything that might cause a problem post-completion, and it’s also the stage where most avoidable delay creeps in.
Enquiries typically cover:
Alongside enquiries, the buyer’s solicitor commissions searches: local authority, drainage and water, and often an environmental search. Turnaround varies enormously by local authority, from a few days to several weeks in busier areas, which is one reason total conveyancing time swings so widely between transactions. Your solicitor chases and interprets the results, resolving anything ambiguous before it becomes a sticking point.
Slow replies to enquiries and missing paperwork are consistently cited as the main causes of delay in a sale, more than search turnaround itself. Aim to get every reply back to your solicitor within 48 to 72 hours of being asked.
Pro Tip: Keep a folder, digital or physical, with your TA6 and TA10 answers, certificates, and mortgage details from day one. When an enquiry lands asking you to confirm something you’ve already documented, a same-day reply is realistic rather than aspirational.
Exchange of contracts is the moment your sale becomes legally binding. Before that point, either side can walk away with limited consequence; after it, pulling out means breaching a contract and losing your deposit, or being sued for the buyer’s losses.
Completion day follows a set financial sequence:
On timing: conveyancing from instruction to completion typically runs 8 to 16 weeks, though a straightforward cash sale with no chain can complete faster. Registration of the transfer at HM Land Registry follows completion and usually takes a few weeks to be finalised, though the sale itself is legally done on completion day.
The main risk on completion day is timing. Funds move through the banking system, not instantly, and a late transfer from a buyer’s lender can push completion into the next working day. A competent solicitor builds in a buffer and stays on the phone with the other side’s firm rather than waiting for an email.
Solicitors selling houses typically charge either a fixed fee or an hourly rate, with fixed fees now the norm for standard residential sales because they give you cost certainty from day one. On top of the fee, expect disbursements: HM Land Registry copy documents, AML identity checks, a mortgage redemption statement fee, and, for leasehold properties, the cost of obtaining a management pack from the freeholder or managing agent.
Everything gets itemised in your completion statement before funds move. Read it properly before you sign anything authorising your solicitor to deduct fees from proceeds. If a figure looks unfamiliar, query it before completion day, not after. Ali Legal Ltd sets out example fixed-fee pricing for house sales if you want a sense of what’s typical before you get your own quote.
Leasehold sales carry an extra layer of work. Your solicitor requests a management pack from the freeholder or managing agent, covering ground rent, service charges and any consent needed for the sale. Short leases, under 80 years, can trigger lender concerns for the buyer and sometimes need a lease extension negotiated before the sale can proceed at all.
Other common issues include:
Most of these add cost and time rather than derailing a sale outright. A genuinely disputed boundary or a freeholder refusing consent, though, can require specialist litigation input beyond routine conveyancing, and a good solicitor will flag that early rather than letting it surface days before exchange.
Check that any firm you’re considering is regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and, ideally, holds Conveyancing Quality Scheme accreditation. Beyond that, the questions you ask at first contact tell you more than any review score.
Red flags worth walking away from: no request for identity documents before starting work, vague answers about disbursements, or a client care letter that takes weeks to arrive. That letter, covering fees, timescales and who’s handling your file, should land early, and its absence tells you something about how the rest of the sale will run.
Pro Tip: Get quotes from at least three firms and compare total cost, fee plus disbursements, against turnaround promises. The cheapest quote is rarely the fastest one, and speed usually matters more to your bottom line than a modest fee difference.
Ali Legal Ltd structures seller conveyancing around fixed fees and a named point of contact from instruction to completion, set out in a client care letter issued at the start of the engagement rather than weeks in. That letter covers fees, expected timescales and who’s handling the file, a practical trust signal the Law Society Protocol treats as a baseline professional obligation, not an optional extra.
Clear communication from day one, and a fixed fee agreed before work starts, remove most of the uncertainty sellers dread about conveyancing.
Readers preparing to instruct can speed things up considerably by gathering ID documents, mortgage details and any certificates before the first call.
Most advice on selling a house treats the solicitor as something you sort out after you’ve found a buyer. That ordering is backwards, and it’s the single biggest mistake sellers make. The legal work, drafting the contract, pulling title documents, completing TA6 and TA10, doesn’t depend on having a buyer at all. It depends on you deciding to sell.
The conventional wisdom about conveyancing delays being someone else’s fault, the buyer’s lender, the local authority, a slow search, doesn’t hold up well against the evidence. Search turnaround genuinely varies, but the more consistent bottleneck is sellers themselves: slow to return forms, slow to find certificates, slow to reply to enquiries that could have been answered in a day.
If there’s one thing worth prioritising above everything else in this article, it’s timing your instruction to the decision to sell, not to the offer. A solicitor with your contract pack ready before viewings even start isn’t a luxury; it’s the difference between an 8-week sale and a 16-week one. Everything else, fixed fees, communication style, accreditation, matters, but it matters less than that one decision.
— Panagiotis
If you’ve read this far, you already know the pattern: sellers who wait to instruct a solicitor until they have a buyer routinely lose weeks they didn’t need to lose. Ali Legal Ltd works on fixed fees agreed upfront, with a client care letter issued at the start of your file so you know exactly what’s covered and what isn’t before any work begins.
Before you get in touch, have your identification documents, mortgage details, and any building regulation certificates or planning permissions to hand. If your property is leasehold, note the freeholder or managing agent’s contact details too. That preparation alone can shave real time off the early stages of your file. Visit Ali Legal Ltd’s property law guidance to see how a seller conveyancing engagement is structured, or get in touch directly to request a fixed-fee quote and set your sale in motion before you’ve even listed the property.
