Roquentin

As a conveyancing solicitor this gave me a chuckle. You miss the point that the skill is knowing and being able to apply your 1000 page book of Land Law so that you can both spot and resolve problems that would otherwise cause a problem down the line. You train 6 years to be a lawyer and you are paying for the skill and expertise. How I only wish every transaction was simple. Some people think they are simple - but that is precisely why problems occur years down the line.

I'm a residential conveyancer. All of us conveyancers in the firm I work for (reputable High Street firm) have just been cut to 4 days a week. The irony is though that it is at a time when there has been a real upsurge in new subject to contract transactions. It has been a noticable surge, rather than a trickle. Do I have a vested interest in ramping things up? Not really, I want the big crash. I'm in my early 30's and sick to death of the fact that I have done everything right, and despite being on an above average salarly, have good savings, I cannot even get close to affording an average property. If I'm frank, there are plently of foolish people out there still prepared to buy and, at least at the moment, they appear to be coming out of the woodwork.

You can now get (or at least you could last time I tried) historical copies of the official register which will show the price paid - albeit that they won't have included it in their house price stats. Give them a ring and they'll tell you which form to fill in.

It seems a case of decide what you want the statistics to show and manipulate the data accordingly. "Hey, lets not include all the repo sales that went at auction because that would make price falls seem steeper - and God forbid that people might get real about the real value of property. Heck - that would mean that the younger generation might actually get to own a home - an absurb proposition! But -on the other hand - we'll include all the sales that only proceeded thanks to loans that should never have been granted in the first place."

I am a conveynacing solicitor so I thought I'd check this out with the Land Registry. And it is correct: repos are not taken into account. They know if a repo because, as said above, a TR2 form is used as the form of trasfer (rather than a TR1) They say they do not consider repo's reflect the real value - even if sold via an estate agent on the open market! I did not ask about auctions. Roquentin