13.3% of all applications by top 500 law firms put to HM Land Registry (HMLR) between April and December 2018 resulted in a requisition.
Back in 2017-18 HMLR set out it’s business strategy aims for 2017-including, providing transparency for home buyers. HMLR have claimed that by publishing a clear list of the top 500 companies using HMLR’s services incorrectly or inaccurately, home buyers can establish why their home move may be experiencing delays.
However, and luckily for conveyancers, the data is fairly difficult to analyse which means it is unlikely that the public will draw on major conclusions from it for any particular firm compared to another.
It does however indicate that there is significant delay and cost in the registration process.
Between April and December last year a total of 2.6 million applications were made to HMLR. Of that number, 346,918 requisitions were returned to the companies because information provided was incorrect, inaccurate or failed to provide the relevant detail.
The largest remortgage firms have accrued the most requisitions amongst the 500 companies named in the HMLR documentation. Based on the evidence, many firms will be losing a lot of precious time and money in altering and amending the data they provide HMLR.
Overall, the information was broken down by application types including: register updates, first registrations, new leases and transfers of parts.
HMLR received 2.4 million register update applications between April and December with over 10.5% of the requests needing to be sent back to source in order to improve or amend the information that was provided. This meant that 255,362 home moves were delayed as a result.
The bulk of delayed register updates were returned in the latter part of 2018. Of the 814,101 updates sent to HMLR in Q2 (July to Sept), 88,704 (10.8%) requisitions were sent to customers who needed to improve the information provided. Similarly, In Q3 (Oct to Dec), 10.6% of the 831,509 updates were returned to source.
Between April and December, 83,531 dispositionary first lease (new lease) applications were lodged by customers. Unfortunately, almost half of this number, 41,419 (49.6%), were sent requisitions to improve the data they had provided.
53% of the 26,525 customers were sent requisitions for this issue in Q1, highlighting the difficulty being face by the majority of conveyancers in providing reliable data concerning new leases.
47.4% (38,763) of the total number of transfers of part applications (81,650) were returned to customers in the opening three quarters to December. Overall, 56% (14,322) of applications made in Q1 (25,585) were returned to source causing further delays in the conveyancing process.
11,374 of the number of first registration applications lodged by customers in the opening three quarter data, which totalled 28,972 applications, were returned for improvements. This equates to 39.3% of all applications. Q1 applications faced the most frequent requisition requests with 3,852 of the 9,730 applications being returned between April and June.
Whilst the registry was clear that in some cases these requisitions were not the fault of the conveyancer, but the registry exercising rule 17 of the Land Registration Rules 2013 to elicit more information, it is clear that far too many applications are facing avoidable delays that are significantly affecting the conveyancing process.
What does this data suggest? What implications will this data have on the conveyancing sector? How can these delays be avoided in the future?
This article contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2019. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
One Response
I agree that the data is difficult to analyse approprately.
But so is the subjective information on (often inconsistent) comparison sites.
To check the potential for giving prospective clients an objective comparable view of a coveyancing firms’ efficiency, I took data on leasehold applications for the latest quarter and
A deducted the number of requisitions from the number of applications to give a crude number for NMIN (“no more information needed”) applications per applicant
B expressed the number of NMINs as a percentage of applicatons and
sorted the result in descending order by the percentages
This produced (with little effort) a league table from one at 97% to several no higher than zero . There were some interesting names in the relegation zone.
Anyone with slight knowledge of spreadsheets should be able to do ths and every firm in the top 500 should have one.
The published data gives considerable opportunity for rubbishng competitors and the conveyancing sector has an interest in producing consumer friendly and validated tables as open data to mitgate the effect of it being used negatively.