Conveyancing is very process driven. The steps to be taken to finalise a property transaction have been formalised for a long period of time. Property lawyers and conveyancers have become comfortable with these steps and checklists to the point that many practitioners do not pause to think why they are actually performing the particular task.
Requisitions on title are one such step. These are questions that a purchaser asks a vendor about the property relating to issues concerning the nature of title to the property. Whilst some requisitions are important to ask as they may impact on the subject matter of the contract, the majority of "standard" requisitions that are asked concern matters that either the vendor has no knowledge of, matters that the purchaser can investigate themselves or simply reminders of the vendor's obligations under the contract. Why should a vendor be asked whether the property is in a flight path? The purchaser can easily look up to the heavens and confirm this fact for himself, so what is the point of the purchaser asking their solicitor to ask the vendor's solicitor who will ask the Vendor to confirm this fact?
These standard forms of requisitions can be quite lengthy and can add significant additional costs to the transaction, both for the vendor and for the purchaser. What we need are property lawyers who can be creative and insightful enough to think through processes and decide whether they are in fact necessary. At my firm, Emil Ford & Co, we use a carefully selected set of requisitions that we feel strike a fair balance between the purchaser's need to know information about the property and both parties' costs in the transaction. Why ask a question if you already know that the other solicitor is going to draft a standard response like "The purchaser should rely on their own enquiries"?
