Purchasing a Property

Once your purchase has been agreed, the expert at TFS acting for you will send you our Terms of Business confirming the professional charges that we have agreed, together with the cost of search fees and Land Registry fees (known as disbursements) that may be incurred. Thomas Flavell & Sons prides itself on being transparent and having “no hidden charges”. You will be sent a Client Information Form to complete and return together with a bank statement to verify your account details. 

By law we have to carry out an Anti-Money Laundering check, we will send you details of how to carry this out online. Once this has been completed, we will start the searches, and ask for you to send us a payment of £350 to cover the costs of these. 

Once your sellers have completed the necessary steps with their solicitors, they will then send us the Contract Pack. The Pack contains a draft Contract and a copy of the Seller’s Title and Plan. Also included are a Fittings and Contents Form which lists the items included or excluded from the sale, and a Property Information Form completed by the Seller which provides vital information about the property, such as which boundaries will be your responsibility. We will send copies to you together with a copy of the Land Registry Plan for the property, at this point you need to let us know if there is anything that is incorrect or that you have not agreed to. It is vital that you check the Plan very carefully with the physical boundaries on the ground as we will not have the opportunity to carry out a site inspection. Therefore, it is important that you report to us any in discrepancies immediately.

Upon receipt of the Land Registry Plan and provided we have money on account we will send off your searches to the local authority and any other searches that we deem relevant to the property. Searches, on average, can take three weeks and therefore it is vital that we put these in hand as soon as possible. However, searches can take longer during busy periods and it will also depend upon the Local Authority's turnaround time. If the results of the searches mean that we need to raise further enquiries with the Seller’s solicitors then we will do so and we will report to you on any unusual findings. Once all the Searches are returned we then provide you with copies.

It is important, if you are having a mortgage on the property, that you arrange to see your bank, building society or financial advisor as soon as possible after you have agreed your purchase. It can often take your lender several weeks to process your mortgage application and produce your final mortgage offer. 

As part of the lending process, your lender will instruct, on your behalf, a Mortgage Valuation of the property. Please note that a Mortgage Valuation Report is not a Survey. A Mortgage Valuation Report is a requirement of your Mortgage Lender and is carried out on their behalf, not yours. Sometimes it is not even a physical inspection and it is a Report that you cannot rely upon. Therefore, you may wish to consider obtaining a private Survey which is a much more in-depth inspection of the Property. If the Mortgage Valuation Report or private Survey reveals any legal matters that require clarification or further investigation then please forward a copy to us as soon as possible so that we can advise you accordingly. Please remember that this valuation report does not amount to a proper structural survey of the property. It is usual for us to raise enquiries about the Contract Pack, the search results and sometimes the valuation report.

Once all parties are satisfied we will make arrangements for you to sign the Contract. The Contract is not binding yet merely because you have signed it. After signing the Contract you tell us what completion date you want. You must bear in mind the need to choose a date which is acceptable to all parties. The completion date cannot be on a Saturday, Sunday or any public holiday as banks and financial institutions are closed so money cannot be transferred between solicitors. Once a completion date is agreed in principle we will ask you to let us have your deposit so that we can then exchange Contracts on your behalf. This simply means that we send your signed Contract to the Seller’s Solicitors who then send the duplicate Contract signed by the Seller to us. It is only now that the Contract becomes binding and your completion date is fixed.

Between exchange and completion we will ensure that the finances needed to complete are co-ordinated, we will request any mortgage funds from your lender and will send you a written statement of any outstanding monies that we will need to collect from you before completion can take place.

In the weeks following completion we will be arranging to register the property in your name at the Land Registry, this is a process that can take several weeks, if not months on occasions. We will also deal with the payment of your Stamp Duty Land Tax to HMRC. Once your registration is completed we will send to you a copy of the updated Title Register showing you as the new registered owners subject to any Mortgage and will also send a copy to your lender if they have requested that we do so.