Conveyancing weeks 1–4: what usually happens

Your offer was accepted three weeks ago. Since then: one automated email, one form you filled in, and nothing else. Nobody has told you whether that is normal or whether your purchase has quietly stalled.

It is usually normal. That is the annoying part.

This is a general description of what usually happens in a freehold or leasehold purchase in England and Wales. Scotland works differently — offers there become binding through missives, so the timeline below does not describe a Scottish purchase. This is not legal advice, and your own solicitor is the only person who can tell you what is happening in your transaction.

Across Great Britain it now takes an average of 154 days to get from sale agreed to completion — 36 days longer than in 2019. In London it is 174 days. In Scotland it is 98.^[1] Most of those days are not work. They are waiting.

Why the silence is not laziness

Three things eat the calendar, and your solicitor controls none of them.

Searches sit with a local authority. A local authority search is a request to a council. Some councils turn them round in days. Others take weeks. Your solicitor sends the request and then waits, the same as you.

Management packs come from freeholders and managing agents. If you are buying a flat, the seller’s solicitor has to order a leasehold information pack. It costs money, it is produced by a third party with no deadline, and it routinely takes a month or more. Sales that exchanged in April 2026 had been under offer for an average of 155 days if leasehold, against 97 days if freehold.^[2] That gap is mostly paperwork nobody in your chain can hurry.

A chain moves at the speed of its slowest link. If the person four doors up the chain has not returned their ID forms, everyone below them waits.

Weeks 1–4, roughly

Every firm works differently, so treat this as a shape rather than a schedule.

Week 1 — opening the file. You get a client care pack: the firm’s terms, its fee estimate, and forms asking who you are. You send ID and proof of where your deposit came from. Money laundering checks are a legal obligation on the firm, and until yours clear, very little else moves. Your solicitor writes to the seller’s solicitor to confirm they are acting.

At the same time the estate agent issues a memorandum of sale to both sides. That is usually what prompts each side’s solicitor to open a file.

Week 2 — the contract pack. The seller’s solicitor puts together the draft contract, the title documents from HM Land Registry, and the seller’s own forms — the property information form and the fittings and contents list. If the property is leasehold, this is also when the leasehold pack gets ordered, which is why leasehold timelines slip early and never catch up.

You will usually be sent an invoice or a request for money on account around here. Searches are almost always ordered only once you have paid for them. If that email sits unanswered for a week, searches start a week later. The date it is paid is the date the clock starts.

Weeks 2–3 — searches ordered, survey booked, mortgage progressing. With funds on account, searches go out: local authority, drainage and water, environmental, and whatever else is standard for the area. Your mortgage application moves in parallel, and your lender arranges its own check on the property, which is for the lender’s benefit. It does not tell you anything about the condition of the building, and you may never see it.

If you want a condition report of your own — a RICS Home Survey Level 2 or 3 — this is typically when buyers book it, because a surveyor may be two or three weeks out. Booking a survey and getting searches back are separate tracks that happen at the same time.

Week 4 — enquiries raised. Once the contract pack and the first search results are in, your solicitor reads them and raises enquiries with the seller’s side: unanswered questions on the forms, missing building regulations paperwork for that loft conversion, anything a search has flagged. This is where things go quiet again, because a reply depends on the seller finding a certificate from 2011.

By the end of week four, in a transaction that is going well, you would expect the file open, ID cleared, contract pack received, searches ordered and paid for, mortgage application submitted, and a first set of enquiries out. Not exchanged. Nowhere near.

What a reasonable chase looks like

Chasing every three days does not make a council faster. It does make you the client whose emails get skimmed.

In most transactions a fortnightly check-in is enough, by email so there is a written record, addressed to the person handling your file rather than a general inbox. The ones that get useful replies are a few lines long and ask for facts rather than reassurance. “It’s all progressing” is not an answer anyone can do anything with.

If you are three weeks past a date you were given and getting nothing back, most firms publish a complaints procedure on their website.

The one question worth asking

Instead of “any update?”, ask:

What are you waiting for, and who is it with?

It is one question with a factual answer. Either your solicitor names the thing — the local authority search, the leasehold pack, replies to enquiry 14, the seller’s building regulations certificate — and says whose desk it is on, or they cannot, which tells you something too.

Once you have the name of the blockage you can work out whether it is yours to fix. Money on account is yours. A missing certificate belongs to the seller. A council backlog belongs to nobody, and chasing it does not move it.

All of this varies. It varies by firm, by how quickly your local authority works, and enormously by whether you are buying a leasehold flat or a freehold house. A four-week picture in Manchester and a four-week picture in inner London are not the same picture.

The part you can control happens before any of it. Having an evidence-graded estimate of what the place is worth, before your offer is accepted, is the difference between five months of waiting on a sensible price and five months of waiting on a bad one. Reckon reads a listing and gives you that estimate, plus what the numbers suggest you offer and what the place costs to own.

Check any listing free

Sources

Rightmove analysis, 31 July 2026, reported by Mortgage Soup — 154 days on average from sale agreed to completion across Great Britain, 36 days longer than 2019; London 174 days, Scotland 98. https://mortgagesoup.co.uk/lengthy-completions-put-mortgage-offers-under-pressure/
Connells Group, 11 May 2026 — homes exchanging in April 2026 had gone under offer 104 days earlier on average; 155 days for leasehold against 97 for freehold. https://www.connellsgroup.co.uk/news/2026/05/11/conveyancing-delays-push-time-to-exchange-contracts-past-100-days/