Conveyancing searches are the formal enquiries your solicitor makes once your offer has been accepted. They are the backbone of the legal side of a purchase, your lender will insist on them, and they are also the reason the average transaction takes months.
This guide covers England and Wales. Scotland runs a different process built around the Home Report and missives.
The three that are always ordered
The local authority search: LLC1 and CON29
Two documents, ordered together, from the council.
The LLC1 is a search of the local land charges register. It lists charges and restrictions registered against the property: conservation area status, listed building status, tree preservation orders, financial charges, planning agreements.
The CON29 is a set of standard enquiries. It covers planning decisions and building regulations approvals on the property, the adoption status of the roads serving it, nearby road and rail schemes, outstanding statutory notices, enforcement action, and whether a compulsory purchase order exists.
The critical limitation. The CON29 relates to the property you are buying. It is not a survey of the neighbourhood. Planning applications on adjoining properties are generally not returned unless the optional CON29O enquiries or a separate planning report are ordered, which is why checking the planning register yourself is worth twenty minutes.
Turnaround is the problem here. Some councils return results in 48 hours. Others take eight weeks or longer. It is the most common single cause of delay in a purchase, and it is entirely outside your solicitor's control.
The drainage and water search: CON29DW
Ordered from the water company. It confirms whether the property is connected to mains water and to public sewers, where the public sewers run, whether any run under the building, and who is responsible for maintaining them.
A property that is not connected has some alternative arrangement, a septic tank or a private borehole, and that arrangement carries obligations and costs. A public sewer running beneath an extension is a build-over issue that may need retrospective agreement from the water company.
The environmental search
A desktop report on external risks: contaminated land from previous industrial use, landfill sites, ground stability and subsidence, radon, and flood risk.
The flooding section of the environmental search is genuinely useful, and it also arrives weeks after you offered. The same information is free and public before you offer, which is the subject of how to check flood risk before buying.
The ones that depend on where you are buying
- Coal mining (CON29M). Required across the former coalfields. Reports past and present mining and any subsidence claims.
- Tin, clay and other mining. Cornwall, Devon and other historic mining areas have their own equivalents.
- Chancel repair. A historic liability to contribute to the repair of a parish church. Rare, cheap to check, and usually resolved with indemnity insurance.
- Infrastructure schemes. HS2 and similar projects have specific searches along their routes.
- Commons registration. Where a property adjoins common land or a village green.
What it costs and when you pay
A standard pack of local authority, drainage and water, and environmental searches typically runs £250 to £450. Location-specific additions push a complex pack past £500.
You pay for searches whether or not the purchase completes. That is worth sitting with: if a search result kills the deal, you have paid for the search, and usually for a survey and some legal work as well. Search indemnity insurance is sometimes offered as a faster substitute for a search, and some lenders accept it, but it insures against a risk rather than telling you whether the risk exists.
The gap this leaves
Searches are thorough about the legal position of one property. Three gaps remain, and all three are things you would want before offering rather than after.
They start too late. Nothing is ordered until your offer is accepted and the draft contract arrives. By the time results land you have spent money and told people you are moving.
They stop at the boundary. The property's own planning record is covered. What has been approved on either side of it, in most cases, is not.
They are legal, not practical. No search tells you what the street feels like, what comparable homes actually sold for, what the broadband speed is at that address, or what the listing photographs are not showing you.
Doing the free half first
Almost everything a buyer wants to know before offering is public and free: flood risk from the national flood authority, planning history from the council register, sold prices from the Land Registry, crime from police.uk, council tax bands from the Valuation Office Agency. It is spread across a dozen sites and takes a couple of hours per property to do properly.
That is what Rooph automates. Paste a listing URL and the checks run against that address, with every source named, before you offer and before you spend anything on searches. It does not replace conveyancing searches, and it is not meant to. It changes what you know at the point where you can still act on it.
See a full sample report, or read what a listing doesn't tell you.