Searches and the legal work
Conveyancing is an investigation, not an administrative formality. It asks what exactly is being sold, who has rights over it, and what the state and the ground beneath have to say about it.
Nearly all land in England and Wales is now on a public register. The register records the owner, the class of title, and the entries that qualify ownership: mortgages and other charges, rights of way benefiting or burdening the land, and covenants restricting what may be done with it. Reading it is the first thing a conveyancer does, because everything else follows from what it says.
Class of title matters more than most buyers realise. Title absolute is the ordinary, unqualified case. Possessory or qualified titles exist where the paper trail is imperfect, and while they are not necessarily a problem, they change what insurance and what lender approval will be needed. The title plan that accompanies the register shows the general extent of the land in red. It is explicitly a general boundary, not a surveyed line, and it does not resolve a dispute about where a fence should stand.
What covenants actually do
Restrictive covenants are obligations attached to the land itself, often imposed when an estate was first laid out and sometimes very old. They can prohibit alterations, business use, particular structures, or the keeping of animals. Many are obsolete in practice and unenforceable in fact; some are alive and enforced by a neighbour or a management company. The relevant question is not whether a covenant is odd but whether anyone has the standing and the appetite to enforce it, and whether what you plan to do would engage it.
The searches
The local authority search is the substantial one. It reports the planning history of the property, whether the road serving it is publicly maintained, whether any enforcement or building control matters are outstanding, whether the property is listed or in a conservation area, and whether any scheme is recorded that would affect it. In a town with a large protected centre, the conservation and listing entries are not a formality: they govern windows, roofs, doors, materials and much else about what an owner may change.
The drainage and water search establishes whether the property is connected to mains water and public sewers, and — importantly for anyone planning to build — whether a public sewer runs beneath the garden. The environmental search reports on historic land use, contamination, ground stability and flood exposure. On former industrial ground, which describes a good deal of riverside land in the Medway towns, this search does real work.
These take time because they depend on third parties. A local authority search is turned around at whatever speed that authority is currently working, and nothing in the transaction can be hurried past it. Ordering searches promptly after a sale is agreed, rather than after a mortgage offer, is the single most effective way to shorten a purchase.
Leasehold
If the property is leasehold — which in this town chiefly means flats, including flats over shops in the centre and apartments on the riverside — a further layer of investigation applies. The lease sets the term remaining, the ground rent if any, the service charge mechanism, the repairing obligations as between leaseholder and freeholder, and the consents required for alterations, subletting or pets. The management pack shows the recent service charge accounts, planned major works, and any disputes.
Two things in that pack deserve particular attention. The remaining term of the lease affects both value and lender appetite as it shortens, and extending it is a formal and costly process. And planned major works — a roof, a lift, external redecoration — can produce a demand shortly after purchase that dwarfs anything else in the buyer's budget. Both are knowable in advance and neither is a surprise anybody has to accept.
Enquiries, and the shape of the delay
Everything above generates questions, which are put to the seller's conveyancer as enquiries. The rhythm of a transaction is set by these round trips. A well-prepared seller with their paperwork assembled answers in days; an unprepared one takes weeks per round, and there are usually several rounds. When people say a purchase is taking a long time, this is almost always what they are describing, and it is worth knowing that the delay is neither mysterious nor anybody's malice. It is a queue of questions moving between two offices at the speed of the slowest party.