Conveyancing

The internet has all but bypassed the retail property industry.

And the same applies to property lawyers. The means of conveying a property in the UK is known as conveyancing. It is a system born of the 19th century with little having changed since the 1840′s when the Real Property Act tidied things up a little to insist that there be only one set of title deeds to worry about. But excepting for the hilariously misconceived Housing Act which brought us HIPs, that is pretty much it as far as innovative legislation to assist the process of home selling.

But even with the invention of the telephone shortly after, and then the fax and the internet and email subsequently, solicitors and conveyancers delight in taking three to four months to shuffle a few bits of paper around between them maintaining Royal Snail Mail as its favoured means of correspondence. In an age where cars can now top 200 mph, it is akin to the preverbial man walking in front of your vehicle waving a red flag as you pop to Sainsburys.

Despite the undoubted ability to be able to contain everything needed for a property transaction to conclude in one place online and the means to communicate in far swifter ways than we did in the mid 19th Century, no-one, not Government nor legal or property industries, seems willing or capable of kicking property conveyancing into the 21st century. The time spent and therefore the consumers’ money chucked at protracted conveyancing transactions is astonishing. The waste from aborted transactions horrifying. The stress and uncertainty illness inducing.

Online estate agents are still a new phenomenon and most property resale firms insist on staying entrenched in their expensive High Street offices, choosing to continue to install funky drinks fridges and designer sofas for buyers that, frankly, just don’t visit them anymore. Rightmove et al simply do their job for them now.

And in that vein what ever happened to the much heralded ‘eConveyancing’ that was championed in the 1990′s. Hell, I even bought a couple of ‘econveyancers’ domain names in anticipation of the flood of interest in a sector that was in dire need of the technology boost that the ‘e’ before its name could provide, as it had with eBanking, eCommerce and so on.

Has eConveyancing been strangled by a legal profession that quite likes long winded, complicated and unreliable processes for want of being able to better justify their high fees and profits on disbursements?

One does wonder.

Tags:

Comments are closed.