Cost of selling a house

If you want to sell a house in Scotland, you will need to use a solicitor. Therefore, it is important you know about the cost of selling a house before you actually sell.

We do not provide estate agency services but are happy to refer you to an estate agent in your area. They will deal with the marketing and promotion of your house for sale.

We aim to charge for house sale on a fixed fee basis. That means we look to keep to the figure we’ve given you. However, there are sometimes situations outwith your or our control that mean we have to do additional work to help you sell your house.

The fee we charge is based on the value of the property, as you can see from the following table:

Sale Price Fee VAT Total Cost (incl. VAT)
Up to £50,000 £500 £100 £600
£50,001 – £100,000 £550 £110 £660
£100,001 – £200,000 £600 £120 £720
£200,001 – £300,000 £700 £140 £840
£300,001 – £400,000 £800 £160 £960
£400,001 and above £950 £190 £1,140
This fee covers all the legal work we will do for you and which we will outline later.

Our fee is only part of the cost of selling a house. There are additional costs involved. Some of these costs will vary, depending on a number of factors. We would stress that we have no control at all over these costs. If you’re selling a house, you will have to pay these charges. So, please be cautious if someone only gives you a note of the fee for the legal work. The actual cost of selling a house is likely to be very much more!

The additional costs of selling a house

Selling a house attracts a set of specific additional costs. These additional costs can vary depending on the location of the property and whether something like a plans report is required.

We will now provide an example of the cost of selling a house.

For the purposes of this exercise, will base the costs on a selling price of £165,000 (which is around the average price of a property in Scotland).

Once we know the exact price of the house you’re selling, we’ll send you a detailed breakdown of the costs along with our Terms of Business.

Cost of selling a house
Legal Fee £600.00
VAT on the Fee £120.00
Property Search Dues (Property Enquiry Certificate and Legal Report) * £175.00
Registration Dues of Discharge# £80.00
Cost of Advance Notice £20.00
Cost of Coal Authority Report £48.41
Cost of electronic money transfer £25.00
Digital Storage Fee £20.00
Estimated Total £1,088.41

How can these additional costs vary?

* This is a combined cost of a local authority search and title search instructed through independent Searchers. This provides two of the reports we need to send to the purchaser’s solicitors as part of the conveyancing process. In addition, we may need to order a plans or other searches to send to the purchaser’s solicitors.

# The registration dues of a Discharge will only apply if there is a mortgage over the property secured by a Standard Security which we need to remove from the record.

What’s involved in the sale process?

A property sale is a process which we will lead you through to successfully transfer the title to the property into the name of the buyer. There are essential steps we must take to achieve this. These are:

  • Take your instructions and giving you advice
  • Carrying our anti-money laundering checks to comply with regulations
  • Receiving and reviewing offers for your property
  • Advising you on the acceptance and negotiating conclusion of the sale contract (missives)
  • Ordering up your titles and exhibiting this to the purchaser’s solicitor
  • Answering relevant questions on the title raised by the purchaser’s solicitor
  • Ordering and checking various reports and searches
  • Revising the deed transferring ownership of the title to the purchaser
  • If you have a mortgage:
    • Preparing the Discharge of the Standard Security and having this executed by the Lender
    • Redeeming your mortgage following settlement
    • Sending the Discharge for registration in the Registers of Scotland
  • Having you sign the Disposition which transfers ownership to the purchaser
  • Settling with the purchaser’s solicitor and authorising release of the keys to the purchaser
  • Confirming completion and accounting to you

Are there circumstances where the cost of selling a house might increase?

Our fixed price fee covers all of the steps we’ve outlined above. However, as we indicated above, there can be some circumstances where additional work is required. There may be issues of title to be resolved or problems with alterations or additions made to the property. There may be a problem with the property boundaries or some adverse notice issued by the local authority. These are just some of the problems you might face when selling a house. We always attempt to deal with these promptly and properly and try to carry out the additional work within the fixed fee quoted. However, on occasions, the nature and complexity of the problem means that significant additional work is required to rectify the problem. This adds to the cost of selling a house.

In such circumstances, we will explain the problem to you as soon as we find out about it. We will let you know whether we expect to resolve this within the fixed fee price we’ve quoted. If the work is of such a nature that it will take considerable additional time or is of a complex nature, we will advise you of the additional likely cost to resolve the issue and fix the problem.

Here are some issues that regularly appear

Some additional issues regularly appear in sale transactions and we are able to advise of the additional charges required to resolve these. The following items attract the charges set beside them:

Additional Item

Fee

VAT

Total Cost (Incl. VAT)

There are additional Standard Securities registered against the title that need to be discharged

£150

£30

£180

There’s an adverse entry in the Legal Report where an affidavit is required to allow the sale to proceed

£150

£30

£180

Checking certificates for alterations/obtaining a certificate of comfort from the local authority

£200

£40

£240

Transferring the title from sole name to joint names or from joint names to sole name.

£250

£50

£300

Where we need to carry out additional work for you and if it does not appear in the table above, we will charge a time-based fee at the rate of £250 per hour exclusive of VAT. That means the cost would be £300 per hour (inclusive of VAT)

If you would like more information or a detailed breakdown of the cost of your sale, please complete this short enquiry form.

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To find out more about selling a house, check out our Selling a house page by clicking here.

If you want to find out more about the conveyancing process, please check out our article: Conveyancing solicitors – what are they and what do they do? by clicking here.