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Vital ‘workaround’ goes live to help stalled sales get to exchange during crisis

Conveyancing services provider Searchflow says its new product will enable thousands of sales to proceed that would otherwise have stalled during the crisis as physical information and property checks become impossible.

Nigel Lewis

conveyancing

A conveyancing service has been launched that will enable house sales to proceed during the coronavirus crisis by removing the need for physical local authority and other data searches checking.

Conveyancing solutions firm Searchflow says without this workaround for the house sales process transactions would have eventually come to a full stop until the end of the crisis, which could be many weeks away, denying agents vital sales fees from completed sales agreed before the pandemic struck.

Although HM Registry is in the process of helping local authorities transfer their data for CON29 searches (planning and building control information), gathering Local Land Charges data or LLC1 information (listed buildings status, tree preservation orders, Conservation Areas, etc) can be an astonishingly manual process in a digital world.

The lockdown has closed many of the offices where information like this is available and therefore, to keep the conveyancing process moving forward during the crisis, Searchflow is offering to breach the information gap with a £1m insurance indemnity policy for each transaction.

“This will unclog the system for a lot of our conveyancing customers who are under pressure from agents, vendors and buyers to get things moving forward,”  Dr Thomas Quirke, MD of Searchflow (left) tells The Negotiator.

The ‘work-around’ as Quirke describes it, went live late last week and is available to all its client companies and insures transactions against ‘residential risk’ which, as well local searches, includes the checking of minor problems flagged up during surveys.

Read more about conveyancing.

April 9, 2020

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