For six weeks Today’s Conveyancer has been observing how many recruitment adverts that included the term ‘conveyancer’ had been placed on the Indeed website. In four weeks, the increase has grown by 59.8%.
This is a large increase, considering a couple of weeks ago we revealed that the increase in vacancies stood at 34%, which in itself was a large growth in the market.
The property market is still experiencing a mini boom, NAEA Propertymark revealed in their July Housing Report that the number of houses sold reached a 13-year high, following the stamp duty holiday and pent up demand as a result of lockdown.
Mark Hayward, Chief Executive, NAEA Propertymark comments:
“It’s positive to see the market continuing to boom with clear interest from both buyers and sellers. Usually we would expect to see a lull in activity during the summer months; however, demand remains unabated with no signs that this will not continue. With the recent stamp duty holiday announcement, we expect the housing market to remain busy throughout the rest of the summer.”
These figures clearly coincide with the reports we’ve been hearing from estate agents and conveyancers who have reported a surge in their workload.
Ben Davidson, Managing Director at Simply Conveyancing was interviewed by Today’s Conveyancer last week, and he touched on recruitment and the demand in workload his firm has seen.
Ben said:
“During lockdown the market naturally went quiet, but since it re-opened the market has exploded with activity.
“We are recruiting, and we had two new starters during lockdown. This demonstrated that we could carry out induction work remotely. Since then we have recruited a further 15 new members of staff.”
The full interview is available here.
The increase in vacancies, will be welcome news to those who work in residential conveyancing which towards the beginning of lockdown was seeing redundancies being made.
Reports from the Office of National Statistics have shown a decrease of 220,000 jobs between April and June, a fall that has not been seen since the height of the financial crisis in 2009. There are also further worries that there may be further job losses when the Job Retention Scheme ends in October.
At a time of uncertainty regarding employment, there appears to be the opposite in the conveyancing sector. Advertisements on job websites such as Indeed do include paralegals and secretaries for conveyancers, however the number has been steadily increasing, showing there is a demand there for all areas in conveyancing, reflecting the increasing demand.
