Conveyancing Explained (Seller’s Guide)

Conveyancing is the legal process of transferring ownership of a property from you to your buyer. As the seller, your conveyancer draws up the contract, hands over the title and property information, answers the buyer’s enquiries, and then manages exchange and completion — the two moments when the deal becomes binding and then final. For a straightforward freehold sale it typically takes 8–12 weeks, though leasehold and chains push that toward 16 weeks or more. Expect legal fees of roughly £800–£1,500 plus VAT, with a few hundred pounds of disbursements on top. The single biggest thing in your control is preparation: sellers who get their paperwork ready before a buyer is even found routinely shave weeks off the timeline.

What conveyancing actually involves

“Conveyancing” is one of those words that sounds more complicated than it is. It’s just the legal plumbing of a house sale — the paperwork and checks that move a property from your name into someone else’s, safely, so that neither side gets caught out. A solicitor or a licensed conveyancer does it. Both are qualified to handle property transfers; the difference is that a solicitor is a broader legal professional while a licensed conveyancer specialises purely in property.

Here’s the part sellers underestimate. You’re not a passenger in this process. The buyer’s side spends most of its time asking questions, and the speed of your sale depends heavily on how quickly and completely those questions get answered. A well-prepared seller with a switched-on conveyancer can complete in half the time of a disorganised one. That’s not luck. It’s admin.

The seller’s conveyancing journey, step by step

Every sale is a little different, but the shape is consistent. Walk through it once and the whole thing stops feeling mysterious.

1. Instruct your conveyancer

Do this the moment your property goes on the market — not when an offer lands. You’ll complete an ID check (anti-money-laundering rules require it), sign a client care letter, and receive the initial forms to fill in. Getting a conveyancer lined up early is the cheapest head start you can give yourself.

2. Complete the property forms

You’ll fill in the TA6 Property Information Form and the TA10 Fittings and Contents Form. The TA6 covers everything a buyer would want to know — boundaries, disputes with neighbours, alterations and the certificates for them, services connected, guarantees, flood history and more. The TA10 lists exactly what stays and what goes, from the kitchen appliances to the garden shed. If your home is leasehold, there’s a TA7 as well, plus a management pack from the freeholder or managing agent.

3. Draft contract goes to the buyer

Your conveyancer prepares the draft contract, obtains official copies of the title from HM Land Registry, and sends the package — contract, title, TA6, TA10 — to the buyer’s conveyancer. This is the point at which the buyer’s side starts digging.

4. Searches and enquiries

The buyer’s conveyancer orders searches (more on those below) and raises enquiries — follow-up questions prompted by your forms, the title, or the search results. This is almost always the slowest phase, and it’s where deals stall. The faster you and your conveyancer respond, the faster it moves.

5. Exchange of contracts

Once the buyer is satisfied, their mortgage offer is in hand, and a completion date is agreed, the two sides exchange contracts. The buyer pays their deposit — usually 10% — and the sale becomes legally binding. Neither party can walk away now without serious financial consequences. This is the moment the sale is truly “on”.

6. Completion

On completion day the buyer’s money arrives, your conveyancer pays off your mortgage, hands over the keys via the agent, and the property is legally the buyer’s. Their conveyancer then deals with Stamp Duty and registering the new ownership at the Land Registry. You’re done.

How long does conveyancing take in 2026?

The honest answer is: it depends, but here are realistic figures rather than the optimistic ones agents sometimes quote.

Scenario	Typical timeframe	Why
Freehold, no chain, buyer ready	4–8 weeks	Fewest moving parts
Typical freehold sale	8–12 weeks	The usual benchmark
Leasehold sale	12–16+ weeks	Management pack and extra checks
Long or complex chain	16–24 weeks	You move at the pace of the slowest link
Genuine cash buyer, no chain	1–4 weeks	No mortgage, minimal dependencies

Two things drive most delays. The first is local authority searches, which can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks depending on how quickly your council processes them. The second is the chain — if your buyer is also selling, and their buyer is also selling, your completion is hostage to every link. One nervous first-time buyer or one slow solicitor five houses down the line can hold up everyone.

What conveyancing costs a seller

Sellers get off relatively lightly compared with buyers, who also pay Stamp Duty and search fees. Your costs fall into two buckets: the conveyancer’s fee for their time, and disbursements — third-party costs they pay on your behalf.

Cost	Typical amount (2026)	Notes
Legal fee (freehold sale)	£800–£1,500 + VAT	£960–£1,800 including 20% VAT
Leasehold supplement	+£300–£800	Management pack and extra work
Land Registry title copies	~£3–£6 per document	Official copies for the buyer
Bank transfer (TT) fee	£20–£40	To send completion funds
Total disbursements	£150–£350	Varies with property type
Typical all-in legal cost	£1,100–£2,150	Freehold, including VAT and disbursements

A word on cheap quotes. The rock-bottom online fixed fees can be genuine value, but read the small print — some load the headline back up with “extras” for things most sales need, so a £600 quote becomes £1,200 by completion. Ask for a full breakdown of fees and disbursements before you instruct, and favour a fixed “no completion, no fee” arrangement if your sale is at any risk of falling through. My advice: pick on responsiveness, not just price. A conveyancer who answers the phone and turns enquiries around in a day is worth more than one who saves you £150 and then goes quiet for a fortnight.

A worked example: what a real sale costs and nets

Let’s put numbers on it. Say you’re selling a freehold house for £280,000 with an outstanding mortgage of £160,000, using a high-street estate agent on a 1.2% fee.

Your costs look like this: estate agent commission of £3,360 (£2,800 + VAT), conveyancing at £1,200 including VAT, disbursements of around £250, an EPC at roughly £70, and a £30 bank transfer fee to move the completion money. That’s about £4,910 in selling costs. After clearing the £160,000 mortgage and those costs, you walk away with roughly £115,090, some 12–16 weeks after accepting the offer — assuming nothing in the chain falls over.

Now run the same house through a cash sale at 82% of value — £229,600. There’s no agent fee, and a good cash buyer covers your legal costs, so you lose the £4,910 of selling costs but also take a lower price. After the £160,000 mortgage you net around £69,600 — roughly £45,000 less — but in 1–4 weeks with near-total certainty. Neither figure is “right”; the gap is simply the price of speed. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on how much your deadline is worth to you.

Property searches, and why they matter to you

Searches are ordered by the buyer’s side, but they affect your timeline, so it’s worth knowing what they are. The main ones are the local authority search (planning history, road schemes, enforcement notices), the water and drainage search, and an environmental search covering contaminated land and flood risk. Depending on where the property is, there may be extras — a coal mining search in former mining areas, for instance.

The reason to care as a seller is that searches frequently throw up questions that come straight back to you. If your TA6 already explains the loft conversion, names the builder, and attaches the building regulations completion certificate, those enquiries evaporate. If it doesn’t, they turn into a week of back-and-forth. Good forms don’t just tick a box — they pre-empt the questions searches will raise.

The TA6 (6th edition): what changed in 2026

The property information form got a shake-up this year, and it’s worth understanding. Since 30 March 2026, the Law Society’s TA6 (6th edition) has been the mandatory version, replacing the 4th and 5th editions. The headline change is simplification: the number of sections dropped from 25 in the previous edition to 15. Several topics that used to sit in the TA6 — council tax, tenure, asking price, and others — were stripped out to make the form less repetitive and easier to complete.

Don’t mistake “shorter” for “less important”. The TA6 remains the document a buyer relies on, and if you give misleading answers, the buyer may be entitled to compensation after completion — or, in a bad case, to unwind the sale. The golden rule hasn’t changed: disclose honestly, and where you’re unsure, say so rather than guess. Your conveyancer advises you on how to answer but isn’t required to verify your responses, so the accuracy is genuinely on you. If there’s been a boundary dispute, a leaky flat roof, or a fractious neighbour, hiding it rarely works — it just surfaces later, at the worst possible moment, and can collapse the whole deal.

Selling a leasehold? Expect extra steps

Leasehold sales are the ones that most often blow past the 12-week mark, and it’s usually not the lawyers’ fault — it’s the wait for the freeholder or managing agent to produce the leasehold management pack (the LPE1). This pack sets out the ground rent, service charges, any planned major works, buildings insurance and the freeholder’s rules. Managing agents can be slow, and some charge sizeable fees for it, so order it the day you decide to sell rather than waiting for a buyer.

A few leasehold issues are deal-killers if left unaddressed. A short lease — broadly, under about 80 years remaining — makes a property harder to mortgage and can knock thousands off the value, because extending it becomes expensive once you cross that threshold. Escalating ground rent clauses spook buyers and lenders alike. And unexpected major-works bills can derail a sale at the enquiry stage. If any of these apply to you, raise them with your conveyancer at the outset. Sometimes the fastest, cleanest answer for a problem leasehold — a short lease, a difficult freeholder, an unmortgageable flat — is a cash buyer who takes it on as-is, which is exactly the kind of situation our sell house fast service is built for.

What goes wrong — and how to stop it

Roughly one in four property sales collapses before completion. That’s a sobering figure, and most of the causes are avoidable. Buyers get cold feet or fail to secure a mortgage. Surveys turn up problems that trigger renegotiation. Chains break when one party pulls out. And — more often than anyone admits — sales die of slow paperwork, where a buyer’s enthusiasm simply drains away over weeks of silence.

You can’t control a buyer’s mortgage or a chain five links away. You can control your own responsiveness. Return enquiries the same week. Chase your conveyancer, politely but regularly. Keep the estate agent in the loop so they can manage the buyer’s expectations. Momentum is everything — a deal that keeps moving tends to complete, while a stalled one tends to die. For a fuller look at the danger zone, our guide on property jargon explained demystifies the terms you’ll hear thrown around during this phase.

Conveyancing when you sell to a cash buyer

Here’s the part most conveyancing guides skip. Not every sale has to crawl through the full 12-week obstacle course. If your buyer is a genuine cash house buyer with no mortgage and no chain, the two biggest sources of delay — waiting on a lender and waiting on the slowest link in a chain — simply vanish.

The legal steps are the same. You still need a conveyancer, still complete the TA6 and TA10, still exchange and complete. But without a mortgage application and its valuation, and without a chain, the process compresses dramatically — a genuine cash sale can complete in 1–4 weeks rather than 8–12. That’s the difference between selling this month and selling by Christmas. If speed or certainty matters — a job move, a divorce, a repossession deadline, or you just can’t face a fragile chain — it’s a route worth understanding. Our sell house fast guide sets out realistic timescales and prices.

Be clear-eyed about the trade-off, though. A cash buyer typically pays 75–85% of market value in exchange for that speed and certainty. That’s a real cost, and it isn’t right for everyone. If you have months to spare and a strong, chain-free buyer already lined up, the open market will usually net you more. Weigh it honestly against your own deadline — and check what your home is really worth first, using our valuation guide, so you’re comparing like with like.

Choosing who buys — and who to trust

If you do go the fast route, vet the buyer as carefully as you’d vet a conveyancer. A genuine cash buyer proves their funds, gives you a written offer, charges you nothing, and doesn’t drop the price at the eleventh hour. Look for membership of the National Association of Property Buyers (NAPB) and registration with The Property Ombudsman (TPO) — that combination gives you a genuine complaints route if anything sours. Our roundup of the best house-buying companies and the wider industry data will help you separate the real buyers from the brokers who’ll simply try to flip your details to someone else.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a solicitor or can I do conveyancing myself?

In theory you can do your own conveyancing, but in practice it’s a poor idea — most lenders won’t deal with an unrepresented party, and one mistake on the title or contract can be expensive to unwind. Use a solicitor or licensed conveyancer. The fee is small next to the value at stake.

When am I legally committed to the sale?

At exchange of contracts, not before. Until then, either side can withdraw without legal penalty. That’s why getting to exchange promptly is so important — it’s the point at which the sale is genuinely secure.

How can I speed up my sale?

Prepare early. Instruct a conveyancer as soon as you list, complete the TA6 and TA10 thoroughly, gather your certificates and guarantees up front, and answer enquiries the same week they arrive. Sellers who do this routinely complete weeks faster than those who wait until an offer lands.

What’s the difference between a solicitor and a licensed conveyancer?

Both can legally handle your sale. A solicitor is a general legal professional who may also do other work; a licensed conveyancer specialises solely in property. For a standard sale either is fine — choose on responsiveness, experience with your type of property, and a clear fixed fee.

Who pays for what when selling?

As the seller you pay your conveyancer’s fee and disbursements, and you clear any outstanding mortgage from the sale proceeds. Stamp Duty and search costs fall to the buyer, not you. If you’re leasehold, budget for the freeholder’s management pack.

Can conveyancing really be done in under a month?

Yes — but usually only with a cash buyer, no chain, and paperwork prepared in advance. A genuine chain-free cash sale can complete in 1–4 weeks. A standard sale reliant on a mortgage and a chain will not.

What documents should I gather before I sell?

Pull together your title deeds or Land Registry details, the EPC, any building regulations completion certificates and planning permissions for work you’ve had done, FENSA or CERTASS certificates for replacement windows, guarantees for damp-proofing, roofing or a new boiler, and — if leasehold — your lease, recent service-charge accounts and ground-rent statements. Having these to hand before a buyer appears is the difference between answering an enquiry in a day and losing a fortnight hunting through drawers. It also signals to the buyer that yours is a well-run sale, which quietly builds the confidence that gets deals to exchange.

The bottom line

Conveyancing isn’t something that simply happens to you. The sellers who complete quickly and without drama are the ones who treat their own paperwork as a priority: conveyancer instructed the day they list, TA6 and TA10 done properly, certificates to hand, enquiries answered fast. Do that and you’ll be the reliable link everyone else in the chain is grateful for.

And if speed or certainty matters more than squeezing out the last few percent of price, remember there’s a faster path — a genuine cash sale that sidesteps the mortgage and the chain entirely. At Ready Steady Sell, founder Lisa Hayes and the team help homeowners weigh that choice honestly: full market value with patience, or speed and certainty at a fair discount. Start by knowing what your home is worth, understand your timeline, and choose the route that fits your life — not the estate agent’s.