There’s one thing my team of conveyancers would love this Christmas and it is something money can buy: more funding of settlement officers in our banks.
Over recent years, I’ve watched banks gradually reduce their behind-the-scenes staff and numbers of outsourced settlement agents get cut in search of greater profits.
This affects you because it puts your property settlement dates at risk of being delayed, especially if you’ve unfortunately picked a laid back, cheaper or inexperienced conveyancer.
We do the Settlement Dance for you
One of the the many crucial tasks we perform when settling property transactions is navigating the labrynth of bank call centres to ensure we can reach settlement for you on time.
We do lots of little things behind the scenes to make sure key documents don’t disappear off the dance floor such as following up to see whether a lender has received a Discharge Authority for a sale file.
We’ve heard that there are some conveyancers that just fax or email that Authority and HOPE it’s received.
As part of this process, we also do our best to keep all parties up to date on progress.
Banks don’t dance alone
To be fair to the banks, they are not the only parties involved in transactions we oversee.
With purchase files, our conveyancers remain in constant contact with the Mortgage Broker or Banker to make sure the Mortgage documents are being signed early enough to leave a reasonable time before the settlement date.
Banks are large institutions and it only follows that they have their own processes and checks and balances to adhere to and it sometimes takes an experienced ‘head’ to alert parties when an overly eager settlement date has been set.
That said, we also have a reputation for NOT taking NO for an answer from the bank.
Our team keeps calling until the last possible moment to confirm if settlement will take place, whereas we know some conveyancers take the NO at face value and think, oh well we’ll just try for the next day. This can have a large adverse impact on our clients if they have a removalist booked and need to change their plans substantially due to the delay in settlement, we do everything to avoid this.
In conclusion, I’m not sure I have quite enough budget to replenish bank staff and settlement officers Australiawide, therefore my team will need to make do with the appreciation and respect they earn from me and our clients for their continued perseverance.
