Costs and Fees for the sale of a freehold residential property

In this part of the website you can find details of the services provided by us and the fees and other costs involved, relating to the sale of a freehold residential property (freehold means that you own the property outright, as opposed to leasehold, where you own the property for a specified period of time; freehold property can still be subject to restrictions and covenants)

Key stages

Our fees cover all of the work required to complete the sale of your property, including:

• Taking your instructions and making contact with the estate agents and buyer’s solicitors; dealing with enquiries and communicating with all parties throughout the transaction
• Drafting a contract and providing documents proving your ownership of the property to the buyer’s solicitors
• Approving a transfer document transferring the property from you to the buyer
• Reporting to you with in readiness for exchange of contracts and seeing you to sign the relevant documents
• Providing advice to you on all documents and information received
• Obtaining a repayment figure for any charges registered against the property
• Preparing the file for exchange of contracts
• Agreeing completion date
• Exchanging contracts (and notifying you that this has happened)
• Preparing a completion statement setting out the financial information relating to your transaction and any balance due to you
• Preparing the file for completion
• Completing the sale
• Dealing with post completion requirements, repaying all mortgages and charges registered against the property, sending the signed transfer and deeds to the buyers solicitors, paying the estate agent and paying you the net proceeds of sale

Our legal fees are based on the valuation of the property that you are selling. We set out in the table below, indications of our legal fees (not including VAT) based on ranges of property values.

Sale Price £	Up to £150 000	£150 000 to £250000	£250000 to £350000	£350000 to £500000	£500000 to £750000	£750000 to £900000	£900000 plus
Legal fees £	£600 plus VAT	£650 plus VAT	£750 plus VAT	£850 plus VAT	£950 plus VAT	£1200 plus VAT	On application £1500 plus VAT

In addition to the above legal fees, the following are payable

• VAT at 20% is payable ,
• a fee for transferring money, electronically for each mortgage or charge repaid and for any same day bank transfer (such as sending the net proceeds of sale to your own bank account) Although the fee varies, it will not be more than £40.
• A file opening fee of £120+ VAT is made for each transaction. This covers the administrative process involved in ID verification and conflict checking in accordance with money laundering law and professional rules.
• Please note that we will normally discount our fees if our Estate Agency is Selling your house

There are many factors that may occur when selling a house which may need to be resolved . For example :

• There are defects with the title requiring insurance, or amendments to the title
• There is a freehold management company involved
• You are repaying a “Help to buy” mortgage*

If we need to deal with any of these, additional fees will be incurred.

If your sale requires additional work we will let you know as soon as possible, as well as telling you the amount of any additional costs

Disbursements (payments made on your behalf to third parties)

It is hard to be exact until we have full details of your sale but is likely that there will be:

• Official Copies of your title: copies of your title confirming your ownership, a plan of the property and any other title documents referred to usually £6 to £12

Once we have full details of your proposed transaction, we will provide you with a full written illustration of the legal fees and anticipated third party costs. We will also confirm our fees for additional legal services related to your sale in case they arise on your transaction. The total costs of conveyancing will be made up of our legal fees, disbursements and VAT.

Time Scales

Each transaction is unique. It is likely that there will be a "chain" of buyers and sellers with different circumstances and requirements so it is difficult to estimate how long your sale will take. As an indication, the average process takes between 8 and 12 weeks