The regular article here at Today’s Conveyancer that seems to draw some attention is the assessment of how firms have done in comparison to their competitors based on Land Registry data.
This month it appears that the jump in volumes of registrations that happened between May and June seem to have continued with nearly 250,000 applications to Land Registry compared with 246,000 in June.
Since May the number of firms making applications have risen from 7470 up to just over 7650 in July, but a large proportion of the firms in question make very few applications. Over 1021 firms in July made only one application to Land Registry. It therefore seems to be no wonder that lenders are uncomfortable with managing panels of thousands of conveyancers when nearly 1 in 7 firms are merely dabbling in what many think is an easy part of the law. The reality is if you don’t know what you are doing conveyancing is full of risk. The claims record for residential property on professional indemnity insurance shows that experience and knowledge is important.
At the top end of the table enact and Optima have maintained the growth they saw last month completing 5521 and 3914 respectively.
Amongst the rest of the leaders Barnett’s in Southport have experienced a significant growth from 853 cases in June to 1278 cases in July. This is now significantly above their average for the prior year.
In contract Goldsmith Williams had a comparatively poor month.
Considering a particular market Walker Smith Way (the firm I trained at) has recently started to increase its local marketing activity using leaflets, improved SEO and twitter. From June its Land Registry figures have increased from 87 to 102 cases. Other firms in Chester have performed less well with generally less than 20 applications per firm.
Today’s Conveyancer would like to make the whole of the data available to firms however as the number of readers rise and because the size of the whole file is large we are unable to do this economically. We have therefore made the top 100 file only available to registered users (who are logged in) and they can obtain that file from here.
We are also considering making the whole file available monthly as a subscription service to premium members potentially for the sum of £30 plus VAT per annum if this is something that may interest you please email us oninfo@todaysconveyancer.co.uk.
