Solicitor or licensed conveyancer: which should you use?

Two types of professional can handle residential conveyancing in England and Wales: a solicitor (regulated by the SRA) and a licensed conveyancer (regulated by the CLC). Both are properly qualified. Both have to hold your money in a separate client account. Both carry professional indemnity insurance. The difference is mostly about how broad their training is.

Solicitors

Solicitors train across the whole spread of law. A conveyancing solicitor can also help if your purchase suddenly turns into something else — a boundary argument that gets messy, a question about a restrictive covenant, a probate complication that's affecting whose name the title's in. If your transaction has anything unusual about it, or you think you might need advice that goes beyond just moving the title from A to B, a solicitor is probably the safer bet.

Check a firm's SRA registration at sra.org.uk/consumers/register. You can search by firm name.

Licensed conveyancers

Licensed conveyancers specialise in property law and nothing else. Their training covers what you need for a normal house purchase or sale, in depth. Because that's all they do, they're often more competitive on price for a standard transaction.

Check a CLC firm at clc-uk.org.

Is one regulator “better” than the other?

For a standard transaction, no. Both regulators run compensation funds. Both require insurance. Both have complaints processes. Both registers are public.

What matters far more than the regulator is the individual firm's track record. A CLC firm with a low error rate is a better choice than an SRA firm with a high one, other things being equal. The HMLR data we publish covers both kinds, on the same footing.

The one thing you do need to avoid

Unregulated “conveyancers” with no SRA or CLC number. There's no compensation scheme behind them and no regulator to complain to if it goes wrong. Before you pay anyone a penny, check the regulator's register directly. Take the firm's word for nothing.