England: Figures suggest residential conveyancing work shrinking

New figures suggest the market for practitioners doing residential conveyancing work is shrinking as the number of law firms in this area has declined by its fastest rate in three years.

The annual conveyancing market tracker report indicates that the decline has been ongoing for some time. There are 30 per cent fewer law firms with residential conveyancing practices than there were in 2005.

Between 2014 and 2015 there was a 10 per cent fall in the number – going from 5,871 to 5,357.

The size of the residential conveyancing market is almost 25 per cent smaller than before the financial crash in 2008.

Search Acumen chairman Mark Riddick said 2015 was “the year when the property market was still coming out of the post-recession doldrums”.

He added conditions would continue to be difficult in 2016: “There is no room for a laid-back expectation that introducer-driven guaranteed business from sources like estate agents will simply keep coming through the door.

“The more that firms can do to meet and exceed expectations with the service to existing clients, the better chance they have of benefiting from this trend.”

Jonathan Smithers, president of the Law Society of England and Wales, told The Brief: “The market is dynamic and has had consolidation amongst some firms. It would be wrong to conflate the total number of firms, in the thousands, with the number of clients who are buying and selling or with the size of the market.”