Conveyancing Is At the Center of Real Estate...Isn't It?

Real estate is the biggest of markets and conveyancing is right at its beating heart. So why can't the average person define what "conveyancing" is?

We’ll dive in, but first a little context.

About 800,000 real estate transactions take place every year, just in Canada. Buying or selling a house is a momentous, exciting, stressful, expensive, complicated process. Not only that, but the process of land title registration and the legal framework of property rights undergirding this process is central to a healthy economy - and a privilege only 30% of the world population enjoys.

Real estate closings are important for governments and economies. They are also individually important for the families making the move.

The stats get complicated once you factor in renters and those buying investment properties and vacation houses, but for most people, a home purchase is a 1-in-10-year event that has a huge impact. Only about 13.8% of the 15 million or so Canadian households moved homes in the two years leading up to 2021.

Here are just a few of the reasons it makes such a big impact:

• Buying a home is, for most people, their most significant financial commitment and a mortgage is likely to be their most significant single monthly expense.
• Selling a home is likely to be a person’s biggest financial windfall - funding a lifestyle upgrade, a move across the country, or even a comfortable retirement.
• Moving houses might mean changing towns, changing schools, changing jobs, or even changing families (a young person moving out or the unfortunate fallout from a divorce).
• Buying or selling a house is likely to precipitate innumerable small and large purchases up and downstream from the transaction - from roofing, landscaping and painting to locksmithing, automobiles, insurance, and new province tax prep…not to mention all the fees, payments, taxes, and policies directly related to the closing.

And right at the center of this outlandishly-sized market, which daily moves billions of dollars and reshuffles thousands of people’s lives, is real estate conveyancing. This process and occupation is responsible for ensuring that the property title, various contracts, forms, assurances, and a whole pile of money is distributed gracefully and equitably from one person to another and to everyone in between: two realtors, the opposing conveyancer, two lenders, their brokers, a few insurance companies, and the municipality.

One would think that given the enormous import of this task, the ecosystem of professionals across the real estate industry depending on it, and the billions of dollars on the line, conveyancing would have risen to be the most prestigious of occupations and the process it requires would have been optimized and automated to near perfection. Plato thought the philosophers would be kings, but maybe the conveyancers have a shot.

One would think. But one would be wrong.

Conveyancing today is still mostly manual, and the task is often seen as a necessary evil between realtors cashing their commission cheques and a back office function sorting out a few accounting and administrative details.

It’s no one’s fault really. It just sort of happened that way. And fortunately for conveyancers, it can un-happen if a few things change within the industry.

Here’s how conveyancing can begin to live up to its true potential.

 

Let the Robots Do What Robots are Good at

It’s not like you can’t find conveyancing software. But finding solutions that aren’t decades behind what your 18-year-old daughter uses to chat with friends, manage to-dos, research the plot of Hamlet, and file her first tax return…well, that’s a little harder. That’s why we started Jora, a new AI-driven platform for conveyancing here in Canada (starting with Alberta). We think there’s a LOT that a smart software solution can do to smooth out the conveyancing process so that real estate lawyers and paralegals can do what humans are really good at. Which is…

 

Conveyancing More

If you’ve automated much of the conveyancing workflow with a solution like Jora, you can run more transactions in less time with less mess. It makes sense: if you reduce the amount of chaos, then you can increase the number of closings.

And that might be all you want to do. But there’s another, bigger opportunity for the daring dos ready to go where no conveyancer has gone before.

 

Conveyancing More...Better

If you’ve automated the details, then it gives you more time to focus on the needs of your client. And you might be surprised by what you find. Moving, as we've mentioned, is a big deal for most people and tends to precipitate all sorts of life questions. Maybe your firm can help with some of those questions. Maybe all the details you’ve waded through at this most impressionable of times might put you in the perfect position to help clients put other parts of their lives in order. Or maybe you can serve as a referral source to others who can help. Either way, you establish yourself as the source of answers in an uncertain world and deepen your relationship with your client beyond the usual I-sat-while-you-signed, which has become the industry standard.

Not only that but if you’re able to spend a little more time in careful consideration of what a client is trying to accomplish - their concerns and goals - then you’re more likely to flag details in the file that a client would want to know about and address issues preemptively vs in a flurry of late-night emails and text messages eight hours before closing.

The conveyancer should be a trusted advisor to your clients - just like your website says you are. But many firms settle for administrative assistant - which some realtors think you are.

Conveyancers need not be queens or kings to play a larger role for their clients and a leadership role in the real estate industry. The difference between those firms who live up to their potential and those who don’t largely boils down to a modern, tech-enabled workflow matched with a little positive ambition and the willingness to take a more consultative approach with the people whose lives you’re moving from Point A to Point B.