Property

The threat of another coronavirus outbreak will make people less tolerant of a paper-heavy conveyancing process, HM Land Registry has said, outlining its own digital progress. In Land Registry’s latest annual report, chair Michael Mire predicts a greater desire to make property transactions more digital over the coming year, saying conveyancing still has too many paper-based processes compared with other sectors of the economy. ‘This has been tolerated by consumers up until now but the potential…

Earlier this month we published three final reports which set out recommendations for reform to transform the future of home ownership by improving leaseholders’ rights and flying the flag for commonhold as the preferred tenure. Recommendations to improve both the enfranchisement and right to manage (RTM) regimes will make it quicker, easier and cheaper for leaseholders to exercise their enfranchisement rights or to acquire the management functions for their building. Leasehold tenure does not work for…

Property logbooks could be introduced to the home buying and selling process to speed up conveyancing. The Home Buying and Selling Group, which comprises various representative groups including the Law Society, has set up a working group to look at how to securely provide a logbook, which would be a digital file containing the key data needed to complete a property transaction. The logbook would be transferable between homeowners. The information, which would grow over…

The hope was that despite the recent uncertainty related to Brexit, 2020 would see stability and consumer confidence return to the residential property market. However, that hope was soon dashed as the world faced up to the Covid-19 pandemic, impacting upon all aspects of our lives. Property transactions almost ground to a halt as social distancing and lockdown took hold, with the market effectively shutting down in March. Since then, there has been admirable effort…

Delayed by Covid-19 restrictions, the latest edition of the Conveyancing Handbook has now hit the bookshelves. First published in 1992, the handbook continues to provide the busy conveyancer with a practical guide to everyday issues, with the relevant law either set out or referenced. Invariably considered by the courts to contain ‘best practice’, the conveyancer adopts their own different course in any given situation at their peril. A weighty tome at nearly 1,500 pages, it…

Latest electronic signature technology can be at least as secure as physically witnessed ink signatures on documents such as deeds, a group of experts chaired by a High Court judge and a law commissioner has concluded. The finding, in an interim report of the industry working group on Electronic Execution of Documents, may help clear a lingering doubt about the use of digital signatures in sensitive legal transactions. In its report, published yesterday, the working group…