Casting my mind back to my very first blog post for EAT's Industry Views, I am thrilled that the particular Conveyancing Association (CA) initiative it referred to is alive and kicking. Indeed, the CA is still very much on its mission to improve interaction between conveyancers and agents, ultimately with a view to making the transaction process more enjoyable for all involved (not least our customers!).
Since then, the CA has published its Best Practice Guide for Conveyancers and Estate Agents. As its name suggests, the Guide is specifically designed to help improve communication between the two with recommendations including agreed timings for regular phone calls and updates, for example.
While admittedly simple, these are important details that can easily be overlooked - yet when remembered, they can make a real difference to the day-to-day management of a purchase and / or sale.
More than anything else, however, the Guide was an important first step in the progress of this ongoing campaign. And this brings me on to the topic du jour.
The CA is now calling on industry professionals - that is, fellow conveyancers and estate agents alike - to help us identify the particular stages in the transaction process that are stalling us, holding us up and ultimately causing us unnecessary complications.
How By taking five minutes to answer a short survey.
Amongst other questions, the survey asks willing respondents to rank what aspects of the home-buying process they believe create issues with their transactions. The survey also provides respondents with the opportunity to outline what they would change to prevent issues from cropping up again. At the CA, our hope is that once we have this information we will be able to analyse everyone's answers and, as a result, come up with some real solutions to the problems we all currently face.
Being ambitious, we would ultimately like to gather 1000 responses - and this is really where you, the reader, comes in.
With less than a week to go before the deadline for responses, only a fifth of responses so far have come from estate agents. This is in some ways ironic because estate agents are often the ones who suffer most being, as they are, the buffer between the process and the consumer. So putting us conveyancers temporarily aside, it's really much more important that they agents have a say!
That's why we are asking all estate agents out there to circulate the below link to all their branches, toall their negotiators and to all their progressors, urging everyone to 'tell it how it is'. In all seriousness and fighting talk aside, identify a problem and you're halfway to solving it.
So come on estate agents! By taking five minutes out of your busy schedules to answer a couple of short questions, you could ultimately be saving yourselves a lifetime of late nights in the office, consoling upset clients and sending chaser emails. I know I am biased, but I would argue it is well worth it
The estate agent survey can be found here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SS7J6SN.
*Eddie Goldsmith is Chairman of the Conveyancing Association and Senior Partner at Goldsmith Williams
Comments
Anyone experienced in this industry will already know that its in all parties interests for agents and conveyancers to communicate and co-operate effectively to deliver a smooth and speedy transaction, the challenge is to find conveyancers who are willing and able to do that and those that do will be recommended by the agent at every opportunity. If conveyancers have not taken that on board by now they never will and it should not require agents to complete a questionaire for them to realise that.
Further, I would suggest that Mr Williams puts his own house in order first. The last house sale transaction which I was involved in and in which his firm acted for the purchasers, the standard of conveyancing, communication and co-operation was appalling.