At last weeks CML Conference Phillip Oldcorn of First Title presented a summary of the findings of a report that First Title had commissioned from You Gov. The comprehensive report surveyed nearly 2000 people who had recently purchased a residential property.
The report makes fascinating reading and is probably amongst the best research done into consumer behaviour in this market for some time.
The good news is that most respondents felt that they had received a good service from their conveyancer and they were largely satisfied with the service that they had received.
A number of other responses should also please many conveyaning firms. For example First Title indicated that the most frequently mentioned reason for choosing a conveyancer was “local knowledge” with only 10% saying they shopped around for the cheapest option.
More worryingly is that many consumers didn’t remember being advised on some of the core pieces of advice conveyancers should provide to purchasers. More than half did not recall being advised about insuring from exchange of contracts and one third didn’t recall being advised on any of nine conveyancing risks that were listed many of which should be boiler plate advice.
Irrespective of whether the advice was actually provided under the new outcome focused regulatory framework is it appropriate that consumers can’t recall much of the basic advice that they should have been provided with?
The report covers other issues such as whether people would buy services through “big name brands”, boundary and neighbour disputes and mortgage fraud.
First Title have produced a very interesting piece of work that doesn’t explicitly pursue support for either of their two main commercial interests of selling title insurance or supporting their own conveyancing business enact. It is a balanced and wide ranging report that is well worth a read if you get an opportunity to do so.
Today’s Conveyancer has been given authority to report on the presentation at the CML Covneyancing Conference by First Title and we have been able to see a copy of the full report. We are mindful of the intellectual property owned within the report and have therefore only summarised a fraction of the comprehensive detail within it. We hope that practitioners will be given an opportunity to buy or receive the report themselves in due course.
