Fees legal companies pay on your behalf
You might wonder what an earth a legal company does for all the money you have to pay. Basically they have to make sure that if you own the property there is nothing that can happen which you should have known about while living there. Here are some examples:-
How do they do this? They pay for a series of searches and bank fees to transfer the large sums of money. These include and are quoted to include VAT charge of 20%.
Chancel searches £24
These make sure you don’t have to financially support a local church.
Water and drainage searches £70 to £100
This makes sure your property is connected to mains drains.
Environmental searches £48 to £100
This checks things like whether your property was built on an in-fill site.
Mining searches £35 to £54
I have to have these when I buy as I live in Nottinghamshire and much of the ground below has mine shafts which could cause subsidence.
Land registry searches £3.00
This is checking whether the property is legally registered with the official organisation, Land Registry
Local authority searches £75-150
These look for potential planning issues such as new houses/properties/railway or tram lines being built nearby.
Source: Severn Trent Water authority
Severn Trent Water authority are open and honest about the charges they make for their searches, even though they sell them typically to a legal company. For up to date information on latest search charges,
visit Severn Trent Services for more information.
New searches can be added as time changes. For example, if you are buying a property within the new High Speed railway line (HS2).
Normally legal companies will ‘package’ up the searches in one fee, so they may charge £250 and some will charge VAT of 20% on top, depending on the Council or search provider. In this case the cost quoted might be £250 + VAT so you could end up paying £300 in total.
Money transfer fees, approx. £25-£100
Bank transfer fee which transfers money from your bank account to the solicitors or indeed to your account, VAT will be payable on these.
Bankruptcy search fee
Which checks you can afford the property as you aren’t bankrupt.
In addition, if you have a mortgage to pay off and are taking out a new one, both of these require money to be paid to the lender on the solicitor’s behalf. Make sure you ask the legal company what this cost would be, as some low priced conveyancing companies add extra costs over and above original quotes.
Land Registry fees, including office copy entries £250
Final fees include registering your ownership of the land and property legally with the Land Regsitry. This helps to check whether there is an outstanding mortgage which may not have been declared. Without this check, you could end up buying a property for cash, not knowing there was a mortgage owed on the property. If this happened, you would be liable for the mortgage owed.
Stamp Duty Land Tax Admin Fee
When you have bought your property, you will need to fill in a form to send the stamp duty tax money to the government tax office. You can actually do this yourself – but you mustn’t forget to do it, it’s a legal requirement.
If the legal company does it for you, some do it for free, some charge up to £75.
The following are charges which you may incur if you don’t get the full quote from the legal company to begin with – they can add up to substantial amounts!
And even postage!
Don’t get caught out, make sure you check and double check whether your quotes include ALL the charges. If you are not sure – send the quotes to us and we will have a look at it for you.
For information on how much you should be paying in conveyancing/legal fees READ our article.
For FREE, independent and up to date advice on buying and sellinga home, sign up for FREE to
Property Checklists. Join now to access our FREE property checklists, including:-
