Are there such things as typical conveyancing costs

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It is a difficult thing to try and arrive at a typical cost for conveyancing work. It’s not standard across the board and there’s no scale of rates like you may see your garage print for serving costs. You are not going to standardise to the penny anyway as scales and charges vary according to many factors.

For instance, there are certain known processes and activities that will be done as part of the conveyancing job, let us take the things that are listed under Office Costs or Disbursements as an example. Such items can include Photocopies and TT Fees. Photocopying is performed as part of the admin function and you are not going to know upfront before your case is started how many sheets of paper need to be copied so you can recharge these to a client at X per sheet. Most large office copiers have telematics chips inside them that record stats leading to being able to get an analysis of how much toner and electric is being consumed by the copier coupled with the ability to price an individual raw sheet of A4 paper so you should be able to arrive at a precise figure but you are not accounting for wastages here. Most firms will just apply an arbitrary sum of say £10 to cover copying. Another firm may not include such an item within their costs but another may double the charges. A TT fee (telegraphic bank transfer) is usually around £22.50 but some banks will charge more or less for it.

What the aggregators do, or the people who run the comparison sites, is to provide the solicitor with a matrix of costs and bandings to apply to house prices within certain price bands and the costs and fees are normally applied from accessing the matrix data to generate your online quote. For example the solicitor could have created 3 property bandings where they would charge their legal fee at a flat fixed amount of £150 for property valued at £175,000 or less but properties exceeding this figure but are valued at no more than £300,000 would be charged a legal fee of £225. The matrix would allow the solicitor to distinguish between vatable and non-vatable disbursements or costs.

It would be very difficult to standardise and arrive at typical conveyancing costs across all solicitors in the UK as different parts of the UK are not equal in terms of economic wealth and standing. As an example Cardiff may have 200 registered solicitor practices with a dozen being located within a square mile of the capital and of these only 4 have more than 200 staff. You can be sure that inner city business rents and rates are eye wateringly costly compared to offices established outside of the city centre and that the professional and admin staff would cost a lot more to employ. All of these things impact on the actual costs you will typically pay for conveyancing costs in the long run.

Generally you could say that apart from fluctuations in the recharged disbursements where some firms are taking advantage by recharging these items at a big margin to inflate the profitability of a job, the legal fee itself which will be clearly isolated in the quote breakdown, will be the only thing that will significantly effect a variation in fee cost quotations.