Marsden Building Society Conveyancing Panel Information

Unlike the CML the Building Society Mortgage Instructions deal with this. Section A.12 states ‘In order to act on our behalf your firm or company must be a member of our conveyancing panel provided we are a society that operates one – see specific requirements for details of our arrangements. The Special Requirements state:

You must also comply with the terms and conditions of your Marsden Building Society solicitor panel appointment.

The requirements to join the Marsden Building Society conveyancing panel is likely to be fairly detailed and is unlikely to include signing up to LENDERmonitor alerts.

Although not necessarily published, lenders have varying criteria . We do not hold specific requirements relating to the questions raised as part of the application to be on the Marsden Building Society conveyancing panel. Typically lenders need to have full knowledge of a firm including (but not limited to):

• Full disciplinary history for each licensed conveyancer
• Number of lender conveyancing panels the firm is currently on
• Whether any lender has ever made a claim against the firm’s PII cover
• House price discrepancies (declared to lender vs. registered at Land Registry)
• Charge registration history
• Full complaints history for each licensed conveyancer
• Full career history for each licensed conveyancer including registration date with Council of Licensed Conveyancers
• SRA or equivalent regulator registration number where applicable
• PII Cover details, including, if relevant, whether the firm is or has been in the assigned risks pool and structure of cover – basic split and history of any refusals

We can't comment specifically on Marsden Building Society. Many major lenders are now introducing ‘file auditing’ as standard practice in relation to completed matters. This raises questions of confidentiality in relation to the borrower and the purpose to which the results of such audits will be put. The starting point is to remember that the file does not belong to your firm, it belongs to the ‘client’. But, of course, we will normally have two clients – the buyer and the lender - and you will owe a duty of confidentiality to each. So basically, you have to separate the file and just send the lender the parts solely relating to themselves. But, of course, as this will basically be correspondence with the lender, mortgage instructions etc.

Check with your Compliance Officer, but a firm should not send the complete conveyancing file without the borrower client’s express consent – and if he is in dispute with the lender he is hardly likely to agree. However, if the lender can establish a prima facie case of fraud, then you may be under an obligation to disclose the whole file.

The emerging convention is that lenders are including an authority to disclose in loan application forms to counter this problem. Mortgage Express v Sawali, 2010 EWHC 3054 (Ch) indicates that such provisions valid? Please click here for more information about that case.

The BSA introduced it’s Mortgage Instructions in 2010 to ensure that licensed conveyancers or solicitors on a building society conveyancing panel had full access to a complete set of standardised mortgage instructions.

In the same way that there is a unique Marsden Building Society conveyancing panel most building societies, operate a conveyancing panel for solicitors and other conveyancers that the lender will instruct. Terms and Conditions and criteria for inclusion on a building society conveyancing panel vary from lender-to-lender. Having CQS accreditation may be a requirement.

Institutional lenders, such as a building society, is a client and is entitled to instruct the solicitor or conveyancer of its choosing (who, in turn, is free to accept or refuse instructions). Therefore, if lender and borrower cannot agree which solicitor or conveyancer should represent them jointly, they would usually proceed on a separate representation basis.

BSA lenders do not come within the top 20 lenders in terms of frequency of questions. The most popular lender panels in terms of questions are as follows:

• Santander Conveyancing Panel
• National Westminster Bank Conveyancing Panel
• Royal Bank of Scotland Conveyancing Panel
• HSBC Conveyancing Panel
• Lloyds Conveyancing Panel