Conveyancing
Conveyancing in England & Wales tends to be rather a competitive business. The firm acting for you does not need to be local. Please telephone or e-mail with details of the purchase or sale price and whether a mortgage is involved to obtain a competitive quote.
It is not usually advisable to do your own conveyancing both because the cost of a professional doing it is quite modest and, more importantly, because you will have no-one to sue if you get it wrong. It is also much more technical than you might imagine. In any event, if you are borrowing money from a mortgage lender to fund the purchase the lender will not agree to you acting on your own behalf and will insist on legal representation to safeguard its own funds for the reasons just mentioned among others.
Most of the costs involved - Stamp Duty, Land Registry Fees, Local Search Fees etc - are fixed and should not vary from solicitor to solicitor. Each of these so called "disbursements" can easily be verified from the Land Registry or the Local Authority etc. The solicitor's fee will usually be quite modest in relation to some of the other costs such, for instance, as Stamp Duty or the estate agent's commission.
Most people tend to think of "conveyancing" as simply the buying and selling of private residential flats or houses and, of course, it does include but is not limited to that. "Conveyancing" is simply a technical word for the mechanisms of transferring property and so a conveyancing solicitor might also help buy commercial properties - offices, shops etc -, draft leases for private or commercial properties and also assist in the legal formalities involved in no end of other buying, selling, transferring or leasing transactions.