"No Completion, No Fee": The Half-Promise
Roughly one in three agreed property sales now collapses before completion. The profession has built a reassuring slogan around that reality, and then written the small print so that the slogan protects the firm at least as much as it protects the client. It is time someone in the profession said so plainly. There are few phrases in conveyancing marketing as soothing as "no completion, no fee." It promises the buyer or seller that the most frightening risk in the whole process, paying out thousands of pounds for a transaction that falls apart through no fault of their own, has been taken off the table. It is printed on websites, repeated by call centres, and offered as the headline reason to instruct one firm over another. It is also, on close inspection, one of the least transparent pricing models the profession operates. Not because firms are doing anything unlawful, but because the promise is often far narrower than the words suggest, and the gap between what clients hear ...
