Every stage of a UK property purchase, who is holding your money at each point, and how to check any firm before you send a penny — including us.
If you are buying from outside the UK, the hardest part is not choosing a property. It is working out whether the people on the other end of the email are real, and whether your money is safe once it leaves your account. So here is the whole chain, written plainly.
Your purchase money should go to your own solicitor’s client account and nowhere else. Not to us. Not to an agent. Not to an introducer, a “secure holding account”, or a director’s personal account. If any property company asks you to send purchase funds to them, that is the moment to stop and take advice.
We send the full pack: price, comparable sales and rents, refurbishment estimate, running costs, the assumptions behind the projection, and the risks as we see them. You read it in your own time and ask whatever you want. No money changes hands to get to this point.
BlackRidgeA UK conveyancing solicitor acts for you alone. We can suggest firms that regularly act for overseas buyers, but the instruction is yours and you are free to appoint a firm we have never dealt with. Every solicitor in England and Wales can be looked up on the Solicitors Regulation Authority register — name, firm, and whether they are currently authorised.
Your solicitorUK firms are legally required to complete identity and source-of-funds checks before they can act. Expect to provide passport, proof of address and documentation showing where the money came from. Separately: confirm the firm’s bank details by telephone, on a number you found yourself from the SRA register or the firm’s official website. Payment-diversion fraud — where criminals intercept email and send altered bank details — is the most common way money is lost in UK conveyancing.
Your solicitorA solicitor’s client account is money held on your behalf under Solicitors Regulation Authority rules, kept separate from the firm’s own funds. Your solicitor cannot use it for anything other than your transaction. Typically a deposit goes across at exchange of contracts and the balance shortly before completion.
Your solicitorTitle investigation, local authority searches, review of the contract and any leasehold documents, and an independent survey on the building itself. We recommend a survey on every purchase — a sourcing company that discourages one is telling you something.
Your solicitorAt exchange the contract becomes binding and the deposit is committed. At completion your solicitor sends the balance to the seller’s solicitor, the keys are released, and the property is yours.
Your solicitorYour solicitor registers the transfer and you become the registered proprietor. This is the part overseas buyers should hold on to: once registered, you can order the title register from HM Land Registry yourself, for a few pounds, and read your own name on a government record. You are not taking anyone’s word for it.
HM Land RegistryOur sourcing fee is quoted in writing before you commit and invoiced to you as its own transaction. It is never deducted from, added to, or mixed with the money buying the property.
BlackRidgeEverything below is free or costs a few pounds, and all of it can be done without asking our permission. We would rather you ran these checks than took our word for anything.
None of these are subtle, and all of them appear in real cases involving overseas buyers.
Take this page to a UK solicitor or an accountant before you speak to us again. Anything described here should match what they tell you — and if it doesn’t, we want to know.