tm blog

Land Registry Offices, Croydon - Image © Clare Forster

March 9th 2014 saw the closure of the consultation on the Land Registry’s proposal to be granted wider powers and become the sole registering authority for Local Land Charges and a provider of Local Land Charge searches.

It has been seen as a controversial proposal throughout the conveyancing profession with a mix of governing bodies and practitioners having been to oppose it and expose the flaws in the justification.

Not all contaminated sites will be this easy to spot. Image © John Durrant

Contamination of commercial properties is not always visible to the naked eye and, quite often, the problems are hidden underground.  Recently, the purchase of a town-centre retail property based on brownfield land, seemingly in excellent condition, was not as straightforward as it first appeared.

The property was built on the site of buried gas works that, it emerged, were heavily contaminated and unless you were to conduct an environmental search you would fail to realise the danger until, inevitably, toxins had begun seeping into the nearby river.

Image above: Three homes had to be evacuated after a 25ft-wide (7.5m) sinkhole opened in a street in North Yorkshire. (Courtesy of BBC News)

Across the country, sinkholes have been swallowing up earth at 4 to 5 times their usual rate but do you know why they occur or whether your client is at risk of them?

You might imagine that this uncharacteristic rise in the emergence of sinkholes has been caused by the recent inclement weather that has swept the UK but, as Dr Vanessa Banks asserts, this is only part of the problem. Speaking to BBC news, Dr Banks said “Sinkholes have not been caused by the weather; they’ve been triggered by the weather.”

Conveyancing is becoming marginalised by all parties within the property transaction, some solicitors believe. With many bulk conveyancing firms emerging in recent times, there is a concern that the profession is increasingly commoditised by those who can provide quick transactions at comparatively low prices.

Moreover, residential conveyancing attracts around 45% of all PII negligence claims and more than half of these claims are driven by the lender, whose ever-changing requirements ensure that adhering to the CML handbook remains a thorny task.

Yesterday saw the first live CPD event of our educational programme, which was hosted by TM Group and Lockton Companies at Clifton Pavilion - a wonderful Victorian building that adjoins Bristol Zoo.

Property Law; A Risky Business was a complimentary CPD event designed to ruminate upon the forces at work in conveyancing that pose the biggest risks to your firm.

Our selection of expert speakers also offered advice on how to prevent and deal with those risks. The day was a complete success and indeed, some interesting early feedback from one of the delegates confirmed that the session had been "scarily useful!"

Flooding is the biggest natural threat that the UK faces and, in England alone, more than 5 million properties are at risk, equivalent to nearly 1 in 6.

However, it is just not just the risk of coastal or river flooding that poses a threat to properties in the UK, there are types of flooding that many property owners are simply not aware of, amongst which is Groundwater flooding.

The debate, on whether personal searches are ‘worth the risk’ for solicitors, continues to rage, as it did most recently in the Conveyancing Quality Standard debate forum on LinkedIn. 

For many conveyancers, particularly those who have had a great many years’ experience in the profession, official searches are the ‘Gold Standard’. Certainly there is the perception that going straight to source reduces the risk of anything getting lost in translation.

The UK is now firmly established as one of the top 10 markets for solar PV worldwide. Since January 2013, almost 400MW worth of solar power was deployed - despite one of the worst winters on record.

We are pleased to announce the schedule for our Educational Programme for Jan – June 2014.

Featuring a mixture of regional live events and online webinars, we will be bringing together key partners from within the industry to deliver knowledge-packed CPD sessions.

Home Moving Trends Survey

Conveyancers do not need to slash prices to win business, results from the latest Home Moving Trends Survey reveal.

Less than 1 in 5 of those surveyed in the annual report, which was carried out by the Property Academy in association with TM Group, answered that they chose their conveyancer based on price, whilst almost half of respondents answered that they simply chose the conveyancer that their estate agent recommended.