The Society of Licensed Conveyancers (SLC) has announced that it will be recognising the Search Code and will be urging its members to only accept and commission searches from Code compliant subscribers, with immediate effect.
Over recent weeks, the SLC has met with the Council of Property Search Organisations (CoPSO), owner of the Code, where they have been presented with a detailed analysis of the Code and evidence of how it has helped to reduce fraud and improve standards across the searches market.
The SLC Management Board has now voted to officially recognise the Code and to actively encourage its members to make this a mandatory requirement for all future private search reports they commission.
John Clay, chairman of the SLC, said: “A key element of our role is to ensure that our members are kept well informed of the latest industry advancements and are always striving for best practice.
“The Search Code acts as an important mark of quality, offering reassurance to our members, to lenders and to the consumer that the information they are relying on is from a trusted and reliable source.
“We are strongly urging all of our members to recognise the Search Code and to only commission and accept future personal searches from Code compliant subscribers. That way, they can be confident that the information and the level of service they will receive are of the highest quality.”
The Search Code is owned by CoPSO and sets out minimum standards which organisations compiling and selling search reports have to meet. All subscribers to the Code are listed on a register of subscribing firms, maintained by the Property Codes Compliance Board.
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Comments
I don’t mean to be a sceptic but doesn’t the fact that PCCB, COPSO and Society for Licensed Conveyancers ALL being registered to Mike Ockendens home address make this story a little fishy???
About CoPSO
Founded in 2003 by six major players in the search industry, CoPSO was set up to provide a professional voice for companies producing property search reports and to drive forward quality standards within the sector. Today, our members produce 80% by volume of all searches produced in the market.
Self interest perhaps?
This is really good news. With the advent of HIP’s The documents contained within were commoditised and prices were driven down. Vendors didn’t really recognise the potential value of the HIP and therefore wanted the cheapest on the market. Opportunists saw the HIP as a potential cash generator and piled in obtaining the cheapest content they could find. This inevitably lead to sub-standard content including searches that were compiled by people with no experience only interested in offering a cheap product. This gave searches a bad name and the existing private search companies were tarred with the same brush. Companies which had spent over ten years building a reputation for quality and service were looked on as cowboys. However, various studies by OFT and Land Registry have shown that, far from being an inferior product, regulated searches, those produced by code compliant companies, are actually equal to or superior to those compiled by the councils. With access to the required information now being universally available the only decision for conveyancers to make when choosing council provided or regulated searches is where will I get the best service? As usual this is generally the private sector.