If your search provider disappeared tomorrow, what would your team feel?

At the end of the latest Cross Border Conveyancing Chat, OneSearch Managing Director Liz Jarvis leaves listeners with one question; how you and your firm answers it says a lot about your search provider.

It’s a simple question, but not an easy one to answer. Imagine your search provider vanished overnight. Would your team feel panic, relief, or would they barely notice the difference?

Liz posed the question towards the end of the discussion, after a wide-ranging chat with Richard Hepburn, Managing Director of Millar & Bryce, about what good search provision really looks like. But each of the three answers points somewhere quite different. And the one that sounds most reassuring may be the one to worry about.

Panic: the answer you want

Panic sounds bad, but it really isn’t. If losing your provider would result in alarm, it’s usually because they’ve become part of how your firm works, not just where you email orders now and then.

Liz describes that as the difference between a supplier and a partner. A partner gets to know your processes, your clients and where your firm wants to be in twelve months and adapts to support it. When something goes wrong, they come to you early with a solution, often before your client knows there was a problem. When they come in for an account review, they bring performance data, market insight, and useful ideas. As Richard put it, good account management helps firms run better, not necessarily buy more.

If that’s your relationship, the panic is justified. You’d be losing something hard to replace.

Relief: the friction you’ve learned to live with

Relief is more common than most firms would admit, and more telling.

Richard’s view is that inertia keeps many firms with the same provider for years. Switching feels like another project, and familiarity can look like satisfaction. Underneath, though, the low-level friction builds up: chasing results, correcting errors, finding out about delays after the client has already asked.

Liz spent more than 15 years as OneSearch’s operations director, and her lesson from that time is that delays themselves are rarely the real problem. Not hearing about them is. Telling a customer the bad news up front lets them manage their own client’s expectations from day one. The same goes for how problems are handled. The true test of a provider is whether they can resolve an issue themselves, quickly and with some empathy, rather than passing it back to the local authority.

None of this shows up on a price list. The hidden costs of rework, chasing, complaints, and delays only appear when you go looking for them. If the thought of your provider disappearing brings a flicker of relief, those costs are already there.

Nothing at all: the answer that sounds fine.

This is the one most firms would give, and it’s the one worth thinking about most.

A provider you wouldn’t miss isn’t necessarily a bad one. Orders go in, results come out, nobody complains. But Richard points out that when search provision is treated as a commodity, “working” becomes the only thing anyone checks. And a provider you’d barely notice losing is one that isn’t doing much you’d notice having.

Some of what a good provider does is, by nature, invisible. Liz gave the example of an experienced researcher who knows a particular local authority usually lists four pages of planning applications for a large development. One day there’s only one. An automated check accepts it. The experienced eye sees a red flag. Richard described Millar & Bryce sending up to a hundred data amendments to Registers of Scotland every month, fixing errors before they turn into someone else’s problem.

Then there’s what’s coming: home buying reform, advances in property technology, climate and flood risk, and clients who expect everything to arrive on their phone. A provider that’s simply keeping pace today may not be ready to help you tomorrow.

So, which is it?

Richard’s own version of the question was more direct. Looking at your firm today, with your workload, client expectations, risk profile and the changes happening around you, would you choose the same provider again? He was clear that OneSearch and Millar & Bryce want to be judged by the same standard.

And as Liz added, if you pause before answering, that pause is worth paying attention to.

Find out which answer is yours. The OneSearch search provider scorecard takes about five minutes: 18 questions across data accuracy, turnaround, customer service, account management, search pack completeness and value, with an honest breakdown of where your provider stands.

Listen to the full episode on YouTube and Spotify