At Martin-Kaye we go to great lengths to ensure that you are kept up to date throughout the transaction. We guarantee that you will be contacted every week on a pre-agreed day to discuss your transaction either by telephone, e-mail or text message.

At the beginning of the transaction we will get in touch with you to introduce ourselves and discuss your matter in detail. We will talk to you about provisional dates for exchange of contracts and completion. You can rest assured that we will do our best to drive the chain towards these dates from the outset.

For your convenience, you do not have to attend our offices if you don’t want to – we can conduct everything through the post.

Please refer to the checklist below outlining what happens in an average transaction:-

What Martin-Kaye will do

• Contact the seller’s solicitor to obtain the contract and title deeds. They will be thoroughly checked and appropriate enquiries raised. You will receive a full report on the title to the property to accompany the documents you have to sign.
• Apply for searches, check results and report to you on each one. This will include local, water authority and environmental searches on all matters and other searches eg mining depending on the location of the property. The searches take between one day (mining) and 2 weeks (some local searches) to come back to us.
• Receive your mortgage offer, check the contents, ensure compliance with the terms and conditions and report to you in full
• Prepare completion statement (financial summary of the transaction) for your approval
• Agree completion date, receive deposit and exchange contracts (synchronised with your sale if you have one)
• Request mortgage funds from your new lender (if applicable)
• Conduct final searches
• Completion day – send money to seller’s solicitor
• Receive deeds from seller’s solicitor
• Pay stamp duty land tax
• Register ownership with Land Registry

What you need to do

• Arrange a survey – if you are mortgaging your lender will automatically undertake a valuation report but this is not very thorough and you would be advised to consider the merits of a full survey, especially with older or unusual properties.
• Arrange finance - you may well need a mortgage. If you do not have a linked sale you will also need to ensure you have a deposit available at short notice
• Arrange building insurance – it should be valid from the day contracts are exchanged
• Arrange life cover – please speak to a financial adviser
• Read all correspondence and return all documents that need signing as quickly as possible
• Tell us if there is anything unusual about the property eg rights of way, private water / sewerage etc as soon as possible
• Check availability of removal companies once you have a good idea of the completion date
• At the point contracts are exchanged ensure that building insurance and life cover are on risk
• Agree arrangements for handover of keys on completion day (with agent or seller)
• Advise all relevant organisations of your change of address
• Completion day – take meter readings