How to promote fruitful relationships with your local conveyancers

As you are no doubt aware, building mutually beneficial relationships with conveyancers in your local area can not only make your job easier, but help your buyers and sellers achieve a straightforward sale.

Time and time again we have seen, and clients have told us that improved relationships between agents and conveyancers can result in clearer communications, quicker sale times and more satisfied customers, not to mention more client referrals. Here we share our top tips for promoting productive relationships with your local conveyancers:

1) Focus on your common goal

Relationships between agents and conveyancers can sometimes become difficult, especially when both sides are facing pressure from their respective buyers and sellers. The most successful agents and conveyancers banish ‘the blame game’, instead choosing to work together to reach their common goal.

Strike up a conversation with your local conveyancer early in the process and make a commitment to keep each other in the loop and collaborate as much as possible. Make them aware of any challenges you foresee with the cases they’ll be working on and if there are any particular time pressures they should be aware of so there are no nasty surprises along the way. Likewise, asking them for a realistic timeline will help you to set your buyer and sellers’ expectations from the get-go. Setting your intentions early on and getting on the right foot can help to boost the level of mutual respect and understanding between you as the sale progresses. Having shared visibility on the chain also means you can pinpoint any potential hold-ups or chain risks early on and work together to mitigate the problem.

Rob Hailstone, CEO of the Bold Legal Group, comments, “With over four decades of being involved in the business of home buying and selling, I have experienced, many times over, the good, the bad, and the ugly of conveyancer and estate agent relationships. The sad truth is, that a good relationship is not difficult to create. The mio platform helps, as will the joint estate agent and conveyancer online forum I have recently set up. Now that the pandemic is easing, make the time to visit your local conveyancer and create or reaffirm a working relationship.”

2) Share as much data as you can

The key to great relationships? Communication. Platforms like mio allow agents and conveyancers to share important milestone data, giving everyone greater visibility over the process. With the mio API, conveyancers can push updates from their case management systems into mio in real-time so everyone involved in the chain, including buyers and sellers, can see what’s happening. Not only is this beneficial for agents as it allows them to provide clearer updates to their buyers and sellers, but conveyancers benefit, too.

By integrating with mio, conveyancers can access the full chain view on properties they are handling, which can help them to carry out their duties with more certainty. Sharing updates in mio also means you have greater visibility across the chain which makes it easier to identify hold-ups or chain risks early on. Clear, automated updates sent in real-time means less confusion, fewer calls chasing for updates and less frustration for both sides; everybody wins!

3) Make genuine referrals

Most agents will have a mutually beneficial referral partnership with at least one local conveyancer in their area, but if there isn’t a productive working relationship between agent and conveyancer, just how confident can agents be in their referral? Working closely with your local conveyancer to understand more about their working practices and sharing updates wherever possible will help to create efficiencies and improve the level of customer service you and your conveyancer provide to your buyers and sellers. This means you can rest assured that your buyers and sellers will have a positive experience with the conveyancer you have recommended, and thank you for it!

Knowing that the conveyancer you are recommending will be able to provide quick updates and full transparency via the mio API means you can make a genuine referral that you know will benefit your buyers and sellers.

Learn more about the mio API for conveyancers here, or get in touch to speak to the mio team.

*Phil Natusch is the Managing Director of sales progression software mio