The real winners and losers in the race to the Stamp Duty deadline

For many in this industry, the announcement of the extension of the stamp duty deadline from March to June merely postponed the inevitable rush. Some sections of the community projected an event like the removal of the double MIRAS tax relief in August 1988. This was when the industry went into a tailspin trying to manage demand.

So, were there any Lenders left looking at their shoes on the 1st of July having failed to get cases across the line when customers needed them to get their keys? Only time will tell as the stories emerge within trade journals and legal action may commence from disgruntled customers.

Let’s take a quick look at the issues here. Solicitors, like lenders, have historically suffered from a poor reputation. The effort to communicate well is something we all strive to achieve. In the race to the recent stamp duty deadline, it’s clear from brokers that each side struggled to meet the least of market expectations. Sometimes technology makes matters worse and the impact of the immediacy of emails exacerbates workloads.

For us, the last few weeks have been hectic. In June, we tried to contact both brokers and solicitors to ensure that customers could complete their purchases as planned. It was clear just to do ‘the best we can’ wasn’t going to be good enough this time. So, we set up a communications strategy that included more staff and even included senior executives making calls to solicitors.

We found that telephoning solicitors was surprisingly harder than we thought. It was common to have to leave a message with reception or on voicemail. We accept that everyone was busy and even though one firm described the atmosphere as ‘mad’ the predictability of getting a completion ‘over the line’ at the last minute wasn’t easy. On some occasions, we didn’t get any contact response at all.

Sometimes the process throws us some surprises too. Given that we all knew the deadline was near a few firms disclosed that they had staff still on furlough. This itself presents a picture of the financial pressures at work that may outweigh customer needs. Inevitably, some firms requested monies but then returned the monies later as they weren’t ready to complete.

I suspect that we are one of the only firms that regularly reviews conveyancer performance. Where we have had a bad experience and we are concerned that there has been customer detriment we will suspend or remove a firm from our panel. In July we will commence a review process suspending new legal panel applications for a while whilst we complete a review based upon our current experiences.

Nevertheless, this project made us persevere with calls and emails, copying these to brokers to the end. The response and feedback from the market has been brilliant and based on our actions no loan planned for completion by the end of June missed the deadline date.

Strategy, good planning, and communication win out every time. Who won? In the end Landbay’s customers and brokers of course.

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