Selling a House or Flat

1. First Thing - Find A Buyer.

Unless you arrange a sale privately through friends or family, without advertising anywhere, you will have to market the property in some way, through local newspaper ads, through internet sales sites such as Houseweb, or through an estate agent. See our site about Choosing an Estate Agent with pages about Selling Privately.

From 14th December 2007 it is illegal to market  a residential property, other than one sold subject to an existing tenant and some other very limited exceptions, without a Home Information Pack (HIP) being prepared.   You will have to commence arranging one of these packs and be able to show that you have done this before you can advertise the property in any way, either privately, through an internet sales site, or through an estate agent.

Have a  look at a page about Arranging a Home Information Pack   It's best to start getting the HIP together BEFORE you commit yourself to an estate agent. We can organise that for you.

2. Once you have a Buyer...

Instruct us to act...

What follows is the way this firm operates, but most solicitors will follow broadly similar steps.  If you are happy to instruct us then you will need to complete any forms we have sent you and usually provide a cheque for initial disbursements.

We will not do any work at all for you until we have been formally instructed and we have carried out the necessary anti-money laundering checks.

We Get the Deeds...

In order to send out a Draft Contract Package we will need to obtain your Deeds. If the property is not leasehold and is registered, we can often send out paperwork that will enable a buyer's solicitor to get started, without having the deeds pack, but will generally need to see the documents in the pack in order to deal with any queries that may come up.   

If you have a mortgage, this will may be held by your lender, and this is much more likely to be the case if you started your mortgage before 2003. Otherwise you, or any previous solicitor who acted for you, may have the "Deeds", or a bundle of documents that the lender did not want but which could actually be quite important, in which case we will need you to let us have them as soon as possible.

Click for a page about the next stage: Selling: 3. Pre-Contract Stage