My solicitor isn't replying. What can I actually do?

A conveyancer is the solicitor or licensed conveyancer who handles the legal side of transferring a property. When one goes quiet, the fear is always the same: that something has gone wrong and nobody wants to tell you. That is rarely what silence means.

Far more often it means your file is waiting on somebody outside the firm, and nobody has told you which somebody. The fix is not to chase harder. It is to chase differently.

Is it normal for a conveyancer to go quiet?

It is common enough to be the defining complaint of the modern house sale. On 3 September 2026, research house We Are Unchained published its Voice of the Agent findings on where movers say the delays come from.

Two things follow from that table. Your experience is ordinary, which should take some of the fear out of it. And the stage you are stuck in has genuinely got slower over the last seven years, so your patience is not the problem.

What is actually happening while nothing is happening?

Almost every quiet week in conveyancing is somebody waiting on somebody else. Knowing which of these you are in turns an anxious silence into a wait with an end on it.

• Local authority searches sitting with the council, where turnaround varies enormously between councils.
• Enquiries raised by the buyer's solicitor and sitting with the seller's solicitor, or the other way round.
• A leasehold management pack ordered from a managing agent, which is outside every solicitor's control.
• The buyer's mortgage offer, which the lender issues on its own timetable after the valuation.
• Another party further up or down the chain who has not yet done any of the above.

What is normal here and what is a red flag?

What should I do this week?

1. 1. Write to a named person, not to an inbox

   Find the fee earner handling your file, which is the individual responsible for the day to day work, and address your message to them by name with the firm's general inbox copied in. A named request is harder to leave in a queue than a general one.

2. 2. Ask one specific question with a date on it

   Replace 'any update?' with something answerable, such as 'have the local authority searches been returned, and if not, on what date were they ordered?' A closed question with a date attached produces a reply; an open one produces silence.

3. 3. Put a reasonable deadline in the message

   Ask for an answer by close of business in two working days and say plainly that you will escalate to the firm's complaints partner if you do not have one. Deadlines are not rude in a transaction where everyone is working to dates.

4. 4. Use your estate agent as a second channel

   Agents speak to both solicitors and often know where a file is stuck before the seller does. Ask yours to make the same enquiry on the same day, because two requests from two directions move a file faster than four emails from one.

5. 5. Check the other side is actually spending money

   Ask your agent to confirm whether the buyer has instructed a solicitor, submitted a mortgage application and booked a survey. Those are things a committed buyer has paid for, and they tell you far more than anything a buyer says.

6. 6. Keep a dated written record from now on

   Log every message you send and every reply you get, with dates. If this ever becomes a formal complaint, that log is the whole of your evidence, and it takes ten minutes a week to keep.

What if they still do not reply?

Then you move from chasing to complaining, and the route is set out in law rather than left to the firm. Every regulated firm must have a complaints procedure and must give you a copy on request.

The Legal Ombudsman is the independent body that resolves service complaints about lawyers in England and Wales, covering both solicitors regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and licensed conveyancers regulated by the Council for Licensed Conveyancers.

1. Complain to the firm first, in writing, and ask for its complaints procedure at the same time.
2. The firm has up to eight weeks to put things right, according to the Legal Ombudsman.
3. A final response is the firm saying it has nothing further to add and telling you that you may contact the Legal Ombudsman.
4. You then have six months from that final response to take the complaint to the Legal Ombudsman, and the complaint must be brought within one year of the problem or of you becoming aware of it.
5. Poor service and delay are within the Legal Ombudsman's remit; it looks at the service you received rather than at the legal advice itself.

Worth knowing before you start: the Legal Ombudsman's own published guidance says most cases currently take nine to twelve months to be accepted for investigation. It is a genuine backstop, not a way to speed up the sale you are in.

Chasing an inbox produces nothing. A named person, one question and a date produces an answer.

How do I protect my sale while this drags on?

By keeping your own spending in step with the other side's. The asymmetry in a stalled sale is that sellers get anxious and commit money to keep things moving, while the buyer may have spent nothing at all.

Instructing your own solicitor early is cheap and keeps momentum, so do that. The bigger and less recoverable moves belong later: giving notice on a rental, booking removals, paying for a leasehold management pack, or coming fully off the market.

Around 23.7% of agreed UK sales fell through in the first quarter of 2026, according to TwentyEA, so that exposure is real rather than theoretical. Gate the expensive decisions on evidence that the buyer has put their own money down.

Where does this leave me?

In more control than the silence suggests. You can name the person, ask the answerable question, set the date, check what the other side has actually paid for, and keep the record. None of that requires anyone's permission.

And if this sale does fall away and you find yourself starting again, start by knowing your number. ValuQ gives UK homeowners free, side-by-side property valuations from competing local estate agents, so the next time you go to market you choose the agent and the price on evidence rather than on whoever rang first.