Do you remember the Fee Scale for Conveyancing? The fee scale was a structured system of charges that set out fixed fees for residential property transactions, providing a clear and...
What does the Residential Property Market have in store for 2025
We start 2025 with renewed optimism in the property market. The underlying fundamentals remain very favourable with interest rates at 4.75 % and predicted to drop 2 to 3 times during the course of the year. This will give home buyers confidence and make mortgages more affordable. There is still plenty of pent up demand and with unemployment at record lows I expect to see a reasonable uptick in activity to around 1.2 million transactions. This is about a 7% increase on 2024.
So the question that law firms should be asking themselves now are as follows :-
- Can we cope with more conveyancing work ? This is key. Managing capacity has been the biggest problem over recent years and remains the big issue today.
- Can you and should you recruit more staff to help grow your business? Clearly there has to be a desire to do this and then you need to identify and actually recruit suitable candidates.
- However, the one thing you can do without recruitment is to look at your fee levels. You could try sticking a finger in the air as most seem to do or adopt a more scientific approach. This is how Minerva helps law firms in the critical endeavour.
Looking at your monthly billing is way too late to determine how much you should be quoting. Remember there is a 110 day ( 4 month) lead time between sstc and completions for the average transaction. So you need to know exactly how many enquiries you have , how many you win and what the average fee of those won cases is.
You should also be looking to get away from winning business purely based on cost. Engaging with customers and understanding their requirements will lead to a higher percentage win rate and higher fees. When someone calls for a quote , they really want to instruct you in most cases but would also like to know how much it will cost. Not everyone (in fact very few) are ringing around for quotes and it's not hard to explain the folly in doing so.
By adopting this strategy and using great tech like Minerva you can increase fees and profitability by significant amounts. This leads to happier staff, happy partners and a more sustainable business in the long term.
Good luck everyone and don’t forget to join us on our live quarterly updates that The CS Partnership hosts for their clients. Contact enquiries@thecspartnership.com if you are interested in attending.
Author - Richard Mathias - Sales Director at LFS the firm behind Minerva Client On-Boarding
