The cost of selling a house

You need a solicitor to deal with the legal work when you sell a house in Scotland. If you are thinking about selling, please remember, too, that we also provide estate agency services. So, if you would like to know more about that, please get in touch.

We aim to charge for the legal work involved in the sale of your house sale on a fixed fee basis. That means we look to keep to the figure we’ve given you. However, there are sometimes situations outwith your or our control that mean we have to do additional work to help you buy your new house.

We charge a fixed fee of £795 (exclusive of VAT) for any house purchase.  This means the cost to you is £854 (including VAT of 20%).

This fee covers all the legal work we will do for you which we will outline later.

Our fee is only part of the cost of selling a house. There are additional costs involved and some of these vary, depending on a number of factors. We would stress that we have no control at all over these costs. If you’re selling a house, you will have to meet these costs. So, please be cautious if someone only gives you a note of the fee for the legal work. The actual costs are likely to be very much more!

The additional costs of selling a house

Selling a house attracts a number of additional costs. These additional costs can vary depending on the location of the property and what type of reports are required.

We will now provide an example of costs when you sell a house.

For the purposes of this exercise, will base the costs on a selling price of £160,000 (which is around the average price of a property in Scotland).

When we know the exact price of the house you are selling, we will then send you a detailed breakdown of the costs along with our Terms of Business.

How can these additional costs vary?

* This is a combined cost of a local authority search and title search instructed through independent Searchers. This provides two of the reports we need to send to the buyer’s solicitor as part of the conveyancing process. In addition, we may need to order a plans or other searches to send to the buyer’s solicitors.

# The registration dues of a Discharge will only apply if there is a mortgage over the property secured by a Standard Security which we need to remove from the record.

** A Coal Authority Report is required for only certain areas in Scotland. We will advise you on whether this cost will be included once we know the location of the house you are selling.

What’s involved in the sale process?

A property sale is a process we will lead you through to successfully transfer ownership of the title to the property into the name of the buyer. There are essential steps we must take to achieve this. These are:

• Taking your instructions and giving you advice
• Carrying our anti-money laundering checks to comply with regulations
• Receiving and reviewing offers for your property
• Advising you on the acceptance and negotiating conclusion of the sale contract (missives)
• Ordering up your title and exhibiting this to the buyer’s solicitor
• Answering relevant questions on the title raised by the buyer’s solicitor
• Ordering and checking various reports and searches
• Revising the deed transferring ownership of the title to the buyer
• If you have a mortgage:
  • Preparing the Discharge of the Standard Security and having this executed by the Lender
  • Redeeming your mortgage following settlement
  • Sending the Discharge for registration in the Land Register
• Having you sign the Disposition which transfers ownership to the buyer
• Settling with the buyer’s solicitor and authorising release of the keys to the purchaser
• Confirming completion and accounting to you

Are there circumstances where the fee might increase?

Our fixed price fee covers all of the steps we’ve outlined above. However, there can be some circumstances where additional work is required. There may be issues of title to be resolved or problems with alterations or additions made to the property. There may be a problem with the property boundaries or some adverse notice issued by the local authority. These are just some of the problems you might face when selling a house On occasions, the nature and complexity of the problem means that significant additional work is required to rectify the problem.

In such circumstances, we will explain the problem to you as soon as we find out about it. We will let you know whether we expect to resolve this within the fixed fee price we have quoted. If the work is of such a nature that it will take considerable additional time or is of a complex nature, we will advise you of the additional likely cost to resolve the issue.

Where we need to carry out additional work for you and if it does not appear in the table above, we will charge a time-based fee. Where we need to carry out additional work for you and if it does not appear in the table above, we will charge a time-based fee at the rate of £250 per hour exclusive of VAT. That means the cost would be £250 per hour (inclusive of VAT of 20%).

If you would like more information or a detailed breakdown of the cost of selling a house, please get in touch.