When selling a house in Scotland, you must engage a solicitor for the legal work involved. Below, we provide you with details about the cost of selling a house. We aim to charge a fixed fee for selling a house. We’ll try to stick to the price we quote you, but there may be times when we have to do extra work to help you buy your new home because of circumstances outside of your or our control.
The minimum fee we charge for the legal work involved in selling a house is £800.00 (exclusive of VAT). This means the cost of our fee, inclusive of VAT is £960.00. For more expensive properties, our fee will be increased. We will, of course, provide you with a detailed note of our fee and outlays with our Terms of Engagement letter you will receive when you engage our services.
This fee covers the legal work we will carry out and we provide you with a detailed breakdown of the costs below.
However, the fee we charge only makes up part of the cost of selling a house. When you sell a house, you will incur additional costs that we collect and pay to third parties. We have no control over these costs. Please ensure when you try to find out the costs of selling a house that you receive a note of the full costs, not just the legal fee.
The total cost of selling a house
As we have said, when you sell a house, you not only incur a legal fee for the work we do, there are also additional costs which we collect and then pay out to other service provides. The following is an example of the costs of selling a house.
The following costs are based on the sale of a house for a price of £180,000 which is fairly typical of the average price of property in Scotland.
| Cost of selling a house | |
| Legal Fee | £800.00 |
| VAT on the Fee | £160.00 |
| Multi Search (Property Enquiry Certificate, Legal Report and Coal Report)* | £185.00 |
| Registration Dues of Discharge# | £80.00 |
| Cost of Advance Notice | £20.00 |
| Estimated Total | £1,245.00 |
When you tell us the sale price of the house you are selling, we will send you a detailed breakdown along with our Terms of Engagement.
Can these additional costs change?
* This is a combined cost of a local authority search, title search and Coal Report instructed through independent Searchers. These are the most common reports we need to order up to provide to the buyer’s solicitor. Sometimes, we may also need to order a plans report or other searches, again, to exhibit to the buyer’s solicitor.
# 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 selling a house?
There are a number of steps we need to go through when we are selling a house for a client. The aim is to successfully transfer ownership of the title to the buyer in exchange for the price. The essential steps we need to take are as follows:
- Taking your instructions and advising you throughout the transaction
- Dealing with anti-money laundering checks in compliance with regulations
- Receipt of offers for your house and reviewing the conditions they contain
- Advising you on content, issuing an acceptance and negotiating conclusion of the sale contract (missives)
- Obtaining your title and exhibiting this to the buyer’s solicitor
- Responding to observations on the title made by the buyer’s solicitor
- Ordering, reviewing the various reports and searches and exhibiting these to the buyer’s solicitor
- Revising the Disposition that transfers ownership of the title to the buyer
- If you have a mortgage over your house:
- Drafting a Discharge of the Standard Security and having this executed by the Lender
- Redeeming your mortgage (if you have one) following settlement
- Sending the Discharge for registration in the Registers of Scotland
- Arranging to have you sign the Disposition
- Receiving the price from the buyer’s solicitor and authorising release of the keys to the purchaser
- Confirming completion and sending you our account and the proceeds of your sale
What might cause the fee to increase?
We will carry out all the steps we have described above for our fixed price fee. However, there may be occasions when we need to carry out additional work for you to enable your sale to proceed. Examples of the types of additional work we might have to do are as follows:
- Dealing with issues relating to alterations to your property
- Advising on and resolving local authority notices
- Addressing adverse entries on search reports
- Resolving boundary issues
This list is not exhaustive but is an indication of some of the more common problems we deal with on our clients’ behalf when selling a house.
Should we encounter an issue when we are selling your house, we will explain the nature and extent of the problem and advise you of possible solutions. We will also advise on the potential timescale involved in resolving the issue.
In event that we do have to carry out additional work to complete your sale, we will charge for this additional work on a time-based fee. The rate of charges is as shown in the following table:
| Position | Fee (exclusive of VAT) | VAT | Cost (including VAT) |
| Partner | £295 | £59 | £354 |
| Associate | £255 | £51 | £306 |
| Solicitor | £230 | £46 | £276 |
| Trainee/Paralegal | £200 | £40 | £240 |
We will be pleased to provide you with a detailed breakdown of the cost of selling a house. Please contact us for this information.