How we score conveyancers

When a conveyancer submits an application to HM Land Registry and it contains an error — a missing signature, wrong form, incorrect fee — HM Land Registry raises a request for information (RFI). The firm must correct it before the application can proceed. Every RFI delays a transaction.

HM Land Registry publish this data quarterly for every firm that submits at least 10 applications in the period. We compute the raw rate as: total RFI items raised ÷ total applications × 100.

One application can generate multiple separate RFIs (a missing document, an incorrect fee, and a wrong form would count as three), so the raw rate can exceed 100%. For display and comparison we cap each firm at 100%, so the figure on a firm page can be read as “the share of applications likely to be flagged with at least one avoidable requisition”. Three firms in the current dataset have a raw rate above 100% and are shown at the cap.

The volume-weighted national average across UK consumer conveyancers is currently 27.6% (Q4 2025 dataset). This is computed across the verified consumer conveyancers we publish, not the full HMLR universe — which includes banks, commercial property lawyers and other institutional submitters whose application profile is not comparable to a firm a homebuyer would instruct.

Band labels describe the data. They are not opinions. A firm with a “below average” rating has a measured rate above the sector average — nothing more.

HM Land Registry also publish monthly application counts by firm and application type (first registrations, leases, dealings, transfers of part, official copies, searches). We display the 24-month rolling total and a trend indicator comparing the first and second halves of that window.

Volume is not a quality signal. A larger firm is not necessarily better. We show it because a very low volume in the requisitions period (fewer than 10 applications) means we cannot report a rate — that threshold is set by HMLR, not by us.

UK conveyancers are regulated by one of two bodies:

• SRA (Solicitors Regulation Authority) — regulates solicitor firms that offer conveyancing
• CLC (Council for Licensed Conveyancers) — regulates specialist licensed conveyancer firms

We match each HMLR firm to the SRA and CLC registers using the protocol described below. We only display a regulator badge when that match is confirmed. We do not guess.

Joining HMLR firm names to SRA and CLC records is an editorial act, not a technical one. A wrong join — attaching Firm B's regulator record to Firm A's HMLR data — is our publishing error, not the government's.

We use a four-stage protocol to keep that risk bounded and auditable:

1. Deterministic match: Exact normalised name match, supported by postcode cross-validation against Companies House where available.
2. High-confidence fuzzy match: Token-set similarity ≥ 92%, no ambiguous competitor above 85%, postcode outcode consistent.
3. Human review: All other firms go to a review queue. A human examines the top candidate matches and approves or rejects each join. Approved joins are recorded in a version-controlled file.
4. Publication gate: A firm page is only published when its join is confirmed by one of the above three routes. Unmatched firms do not appear on the site.

This means the site deliberately publishes fewer firms than appear in the HMLR data. The v1 target is 500–1,500 verified firms. The rest wait for human review.

We pull two fields from Companies House in v1: incorporation date (to show “Established YYYY”) and registered office (to cross-check the SRA address during matching). We do not surface financial health signals — accounts filing status, director changes, charges, or insolvency — in v1. That interpretive layer carries higher legal risk than the basic regulatory data; we will revisit it once editorial credibility is established.

• We do not rank firms on price. Conveyancing quotes vary by transaction complexity.
• We do not claim to know how long a firm's transactions take. PPD does not name the conveyancer — only area-level timing is defensible.
• We do not publish individual solicitor names in any performance context.
• We do not make predictions about firm health.
• We do not accept payment to alter rankings.

Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

If you believe a data point on your firm's page is incorrect, please contact us via the corrections page. We aim to acknowledge within 24 hours and verify within 5 working days.

If the underlying government dataset has changed: we update and log the correction publicly. If we made a matching error: we pull the page immediately, fix the join, republish only when verified, and log the correction.