There
is a huge shortage in the conveyancing job market at the moment, with a
shortfall of conveyancing lawyers in most law firms and increased
amounts of work coming in. As I write this article in September 2021 we
have already had reports from industry experts that the market would
crash or drop after June and the end of the stamp duty holiday, and
subsequently that the market would drop or crash at the end of September
2021 at the end of all support to the property market.
What
these reports and predictions don’t take into account is that there
have been seismic shifts in the numbers of conveyancers either looking
for work or currently in roles.
A Brief History According to Ten Percent Legal
In
order to explain the conveyancing job market a bit of history is
needed. Back in the mid 1990s conveyancing was starting to be seen as
the poor cousin to most other areas of law on the high street. The
government had removed a whole load of different bits of regulation -
solicitors could now advertise for work, they could set prices, drop
prices, pay referral fees (to a certain extent) and generally take part
in competition to bring down prices of conveyancing. The bottom dropped
out of the market and soon pretty much every firm was heading rapidly
downhill in the amount of money it could make out of conveyancing. The
theory was that if protection for the market was removed, it would
increase competition & effiiciency and therefore drive down prices
with the work being done at the same level of quality.
What
actually happened was that firms started making less money out of
conveyancing, mistakes were made, professional indemnity insurance shot
up and large operations started to appear to do vast amounts of
conveyancing at low prices.
The Big Collapse
Fast
forward to 2008 and the bank collapse followed by the property crash
put an end to a lot of conveyancing business for quite some time across
the UK. We watched as a legal job market driven by the property market
and making up a sizeable chunk of our profits drop down to less than
about 5% of our turnover and the vast majority of conveyancers either
not looking for work under any circumstances because there wasn’t any to
be found, and if there was any it would be done on a profit share, or
moving out of the profession completely.
It
got to the point where we were getting reports from conveyancing
lawyers of many years standing that they were now earning more doing
their part time jobs on the side to support their families than they
were from the actual conveyancing work they were doing as well, whether
on a profit share or part time or zero hours contract. We came across
conveyancers taking roles as council planning officers and working night
shifts in Tesco. Teaching and lecturing roles seemed very popular.
Slow Movement
This
market remained in place for about four to five years with very little
conveyancing work and recruitment going on. When there was recruitment
the salaries were not sufficient to attract anyone back into a role, or
to get someone to move from one practice to another. Certain law firms
deluded themselves into thinking that there were lots of willing and
able conveyancers out there happy to work for less than they would get
if they were working as a HGV lorry driver, and this was not necessarily
the fault of the law firms, who since the 1990s had seen their own
profits plummet from doing conveyancing, and therefore were not in a
position to pay very much more.
Also
quite a few conveyancing solicitors had discovered locuming work,
partly by accident, and did not really want to move back into a salaried
permanent role. Locuming for conveyancing took off in about 2014 and
has got busier every year since.
The Pandemic
However
fast forwarding to the start of the pandemic and the property jobs
market was nice and stable, consistent place, with a regular movement of
staff from one firm to the next, a reasonable supply of conveyancing
lawyers, whether locum or permanent, and a steady supply of work to most
firms.
Unfortunately
the pandemic then hit in March 2020 and the property market yet again
went off a cliff. There was very little conveyancing going on because
there were no viewings and no-one was allowed to travel to work. Pretty
much everything across the economy stopped, but as usual the property
market was excessively affected by all the seismic movements in the
economy.
This
meant that yet again conveyancers needed to be flexible and start to
look at other options, whether within or outside the legal profession,
and yet again there was very little work around for anybody who had
found themselves out of a job at the start of the pandemic, or in need
of locum work to sustain themselves.
Of
course this meant that at about this time people were looking at
alternative options, and therefore moving away from their traditional
work of conveyancing into other things. So when we fast forward to the
summer of 2021 and the huge amount of conveyancing going through law
firms because of the stamp duty holiday and the sudden build up of
savings in the economy, there were not enough conveyancers to do the
work.
Conveyancer Shortage and £75k Salaries
Conveyancers
who were available to do the work suddenly found themselves in huge
demand for other firms who were, due to the amount of work coming
through, suddenly able to pay increased amounts of money to attract
staff. These increases in money meant that conveyancers were now able to
start looking for alternative jobs, and in the same way that some
houses across the country started to change hands at ridiculous prices,
conveyancing staff found themselves being offered salaries by firms who
used to offer £45,000 who are now putting out figures of £75,000 in
order to try and get somebody in to cover the work.
Even
so, we found that a good number of roles where firms were advertising
at very high prices were still not attracting staff in because
conveyancers who had been working flat out over the summer dealing with
the increased caseload, were getting increasingly fed up of doing more
of the same.
External Factors and Stress Levels
The
conveyancing process is still incredibly creaky and much, much slower
than it could be. From the various searches, title checks, each party
arguing and communicating with the other through all sorts of different
means without any set procedures, the Land Registry not being
sufficiently staffed or automated, title maps not being sufficiently
accurate to record ownership in all cases and delays being thrown up at
just about every single stage of the whole transaction.
We
know ourselves from anecdotal experience that when there is a delay in
the sale/purchase of a property all the parties simply blame the
solicitors. The solicitors then get contacted constantly by just about
everyone even when its nothing to do with them!
All
of this makes the experience for most people buying and selling houses
much more stressful than it ever needs to be. No-one has ever managed to
really get control of this and sort it out so that the whole
transaction becomes so much smoother, without any need for lengthy
discussions or interventions from different parties.
The
reason I’ve included this bit in this article is because the pressure
all of this puts on conveyancers for the work they do is tremendous and a
lot of them find it to be so stressful they simply don’t want to
continue. We get conveyancers contacting us fairly regularly looking for
work in anything other than conveyancing and this has been the case now
for a good number of years but dramatically increased since the
pandemic.
The
stamp duty holiday caseload has resulted in a number of conveyancing
lawyers deciding they never want to do conveyancing again. Just to add
to that is also the issue that quite a good number of conveyancers are
older staff who have been doing it for long periods of time, and
reaching the end of their career. Newer conveyancing lawyers coming into
the market do a couple of years and then decide it’s simply not for
them and move on to other things, to have less stress, shorter hours and
better pay.
Conveyancing and HGV Drivers
So
a little bit like HGV drivers, the market in smaller firms is top heavy
with experienced staff who in turn work in their own way that may or
may not include maximising the use of technology. This in turn causes
issues for firms - we get a number of calls from practice managers who
want to book a locum but are most apologetic because Bob Jones the
conveyancer has his own way of working and most files are paper based
and no remote working is possible (which in turn removes a large number
of available locums!).
Locums - a Cog in the Wheel
Conveyancing
locums provide short term solutions to increases in work or absence of
staff, whether through sickness or annual leave. Unfortunately the
recent pandemic has drastically reduced the amount of availability of
conveyancing locums because a number of them have taken fairly well paid
permanent roles, others are not willing to travel to do conveyancing
work, others have become disillusioned at the sheer amount of work that
was dumped upon them when the stamp duty holiday came in and simply
don’t want to do work for certain firms, and others charge so much that
firms cannot afford them. Similarly the market is aging and a number of
locums are retiring completely (and others have passed away).
It
has gone from a situation where if a conveyancing assignment came in to
us we would be 80-90% sure of filling it or providing at least one
potential locum to the firm for them to consider. In the summer we found
ourselves being able to supply just one CV for every five conveyancing
locum assignments that come our way, and even then it’s likely to be
someone we either haven’t worked with before or charging serious amounts
of money to do a job that would have cost a lot less a few years ago.
So where does this leave the conveyancing market?
If
the cost of undertaking the conveyancing is going up then surely it is
time to increase the cost per conveyancing transaction in the hope of
reducing the work yet maintaining turnover and profit from doing less of
it for the same amount of money. Easier said than done of course, and
we know as much as anyone else that as soon as you increase your prices
you lose business! However the one area we think everyone can improve
their staff retention is to reward them in the good times wherever
possible.
Allow your staff to benefit
Whilst
increasing salaries may not be an option, firms perhaps need to look at
their bonus structures and make it easier for staff to benefit from any
boom in the conveyancing market, and to avoid the whole saga of
conveyancing lawyers looking to move on as soon as the market gets busy
because other companies are paying a lot more than yours.
Obviously
partners of law firms will say, “Yes but in the quieter times we look
after our staff and still pay them, so our staff ought to show us some
loyalty when we stick by them in those times when we get to busier times
and we take more of the profit”.
I
entirely agree with this sentiment but it’s not reality. People who are
not being particularly well paid in the first place will always look to
move on if somebody comes along waving more money at them for the same
work, provided there’s no other issues involved. It’s human nature and I
think at times partners of law firms forget that everyone has to pay
overheads and bills, and it’s easier said than done to retain staff
solely on a loyalty basis.
Going
forwards from 2021 it is highly likely that the market will drop down
to more quieter levels as all sorts of new crises kick in and the
property market quietens down a lot. It is these times when firms have
to start thinking about the next boom and how they’re going to deal with
it, and perhaps put things in place now that will enable them to
survive in the longer term.
This article was first published as part of the Legal Recruitment News in October 2021 - www.legal-recruitment.co.uk
