The conveyancer

A conveyancer was selected. It does no harm to get things organised early. The conveyance fee was estimated at $470. Nothing is ever cheep. I find it interesting that in some states, such as in Victoria, you can choose to use either the services of a conveyancer or a solicitor to conduct the property settlement tasks. Solicitors are notoriously more expensive than conveyancers, but the job still gets done by whoever does it. So, I don’t know why people use lawyers, when there is an alternative. There must be a lot of very suspicious individuals out there who think that it’s only a lawyer who can be trusted to do the job properly. Of course, in some states there is no choice. The ACT does not use conveyancers and it’s the same in Tasmania.

I don’t think it takes too much imagination to guess that a legal practice is not going to set a top lawyer to the job of sifting through land ownership documents and the rest of the guff that’s required for a property transaction when they can put a clerk on the job who is on a fraction of the salary, and no doubt charge top dollar for the service. If that’s going to happen, why not use a conveyancer in the first places; there are dozens listed in the phone book. Save some money.

You might like to think that if you employ these people to look after your interests, then that’s what they might do. I purchased a property in Tasmania some years ago, and of course, employed a solicitor to manage the transaction. One of the things that annoyed me was a letter I received from the solicitor asking me to check that the property described on the title was in fact the one that I intended to purchase. This is a reasonable concern, and requires a certain expertise.

I recall watching an evening current affairs TV program some years ago. One of the program’s segments was about a builder who had mistakenly constructed a house on the wrong building block. The house was constructed on the block next door to the one it should have been built on. A house is a difficult thing to move after it has been constructed. This would be a difficult situation for all concerned. The block owner wouldn’t want to pay for a house they did not order. The intended owner wouldn’t want to pay for a house they don’t have. I’m not sure how this was resolved, but it’s a dilemma to be avoided.

The solicitor’s letter went on to say I should also check the boundary pegs to ensure everything was as noted in the title document. Have you ever tried looking for a boundary peg on your property? Very often they don’t exist. Perhaps if I were a surveyor I could get my equipment out and determine the boundaries from the nearest benchmark. I am not a surveyor, and was annoyed by their request. I wrote to the solicitor suggesting that it was their job to do this and should be part of the conveyancing service. They said they would not proceed until I confirmed the details were accurate, and suggested I employ my own surveyor if I had doubts about the property boundaries.

I wasn’t impressed. I can’t help wondering if you’d be just as well picking up some how-to book and doing your own conveyancing.