conveyancing - OneSearch

Japanese knotweed rarely brings down a house. It brings down sales, mortgage offers and sometimes a seller’s defence in court.

In 2023, a buyer clearing the garden of his new £700,000 home in south-west London found knotweed growing behind a bush near the shed. The seller had ticked “no” on the TA6, and the bill that followed came to roughly £200,000. The plant hasn’t changed much since then, but the form has, so here is where knotweed stands for conveyancers in 2026.

What is Japanese knotweed, and is it illegal to have it?

Japanese knotweed is an invasive plant that spreads underground through rhizomes, and even small fragments can regrow. Left unmanaged, it can push through paving, crack garden walls and get into drains and outbuildings. It is far less likely to threaten the structure of a sound house, although buyers and lenders don’t always find that reassuring.

Having it isn’t illegal, and there’s no duty to remove it from your own land. The law applies in three other places. It is an offence under section 14 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 to plant it or otherwise cause it to grow in the wild. Knotweed and soil containing it count as controlled waste, so it can’t go in the green bin (or a skip). And councils can serve a community protection notice on an owner who lets it spread and does nothing about it.

What does the TA6 ask about it now?

Since 30 March 2026, firms accredited under the Law Society’s Conveyancing Quality Scheme have had to use the sixth edition of the TA6 for every new instruction. The fourth and fifth editions have been withdrawn, although matters already running on an older form can carry on with it.

Knotweed sits in section 8, Environmental matters. Question 8.6 asks whether the property is affected, and 8.7 asks about surveys and management plans. The Law Society’s explanatory notes say a property is usually treated as at risk if knotweed is growing on it or within three metres of its boundary. They also accept that sellers can’t easily be certain, because rhizome can sit in the soil with nothing showing above ground. That’s why many sellers answer “not known”.

Is “not known” a safe answer?

If it’s true, yes. An honest “not known” passes the job of investigating to the buyer, who can commission a specialist survey if they want certainty.

It isn’t a hiding place, though. A seller with a treatment invoice in a drawer doesn’t “not know”, and the notes are clear that sellers must answer from what they know and update their answers if anything changes before exchange. That applies to executors and attorneys too, even if they’ve never set foot in the garden.

The riskier box is “no”, because it is a positive statement that the plant isn’t there. In the 2023 case, expert evidence showed the knotweed by the shed had once stood around two metres tall and had been treated with herbicide during the seller’s ownership. The court didn’t accept that he believed his answer, and he was ordered to pay around £32,000 in damages plus up to £95,000 of the buyer’s legal costs.

Whatever happened to the seven-metre rule?

RICS dug it up in 2022, and unlike the plant, it hasn’t grown back. The RICS standard Japanese knotweed and residential property, in force since 23 March 2022, replaced the old rule of thumb that any knotweed within seven metres of a house was a problem.

Valuers now use a decision tree that places an infestation in one of four management categories, A to D, based on what it is actually doing: whether it’s affecting a structure, restricting use of the garden or simply growing nearby. Lenders generally only expect a retention in the more serious categories, and knotweed on a neighbour’s land within three metres of the boundary won’t usually trigger one by itself. Individual lenders can still set their own criteria, so it’s worth checking.

What if it crosses the boundary?

Then it becomes a nuisance question. In Network Rail v Williams [2018] EWCA Civ 1514, the Court of Appeal held that rhizomes encroaching onto a neighbour’s land can be an actionable nuisance before any physical damage is done, where the landowner knows (or ought to know) about the risk and doesn’t act reasonably.

The Supreme Court narrowed that in Davies v Bridgend County Borough Council [2024] UKSC 15. Knotweed had spread from council land into Mr Davies’s garden long before the council was in breach of any duty, and he couldn’t recover the loss in value that remained after treatment, because the breach hadn’t caused it. Historic spread is now a much harder claim to win. Knotweed heading over the fence today is a different matter.

What should a buyer ask for?

Paperwork. Where knotweed is present or has been treated, the buyer’s conveyancer should expect to see:

a survey by a contractor accredited by the Property Care Association or the Invasive Non-Native Specialists Association
a written management plan, usually running over several years
an insurance-backed guarantee, typically for ten years, with confirmation that it transfers to the buyer
records of the treatment carried out so far

The aim these days is management rather than eradication. A documented, guaranteed infestation is something a lender can work with. An undocumented one is a guess. An environmental search can also help show whether knotweed has been recorded nearby. [CHECK: confirm which OneSearch reports include knotweed data and link the specific product]

The knotweed behind that shed in south-west London cost its seller about £200,000, and hardly any of it went on digging. Almost all of it came from one tick in the wrong box.

So treat question 8.6 as the start of a conversation. A “yes” should arrive with a plan and a guarantee, a “not known” is an invitation to survey, and a “no” deserves a polite question about what it’s based on.

Gazumping is still legal in England and Wales, and will be for a while yet. Here’s why it happens, what it costs and what’s changing.

Agree a price on a house in Glasgow and, once the missives are concluded, both sides are bound. Agree a price in Gloucester and what you have is an accepted offer, a memorandum of sale and around four months of hoping nobody turns up with a bigger number. That gap is where gazumping lives. In June 2026 the government said it intends to close it, just not yet.

What is gazumping?

Gazumping is when a seller accepts one offer, then drops it for a higher one from someone else before contracts are exchanged. The first buyer can match or beat the new figure, or walk away.

It has a mirror image. Gazundering is when a buyer cuts their offer late in the transaction, often close to exchange, betting that the seller (and possibly a whole chain) can’t afford to start again.

Why is it legal?

Because until exchange there’s nothing to break. An accepted offer isn’t a contract, and neither is the estate agent’s memorandum of sale. A contract for the sale of land has to be in writing, signed by both parties and contain all the agreed terms under section 2 of the Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989, and in a residential sale that normally happens at exchange.

Agents don’t stop taking offers, either. Under the Estate Agents (Undesirable Practices) (No. 2) Order 1991, they must pass every offer to the seller promptly and in writing, unless the seller has said in writing that they don’t want to receive it. “Under offer” on a listing tells buyers where things stand. It doesn’t close the door.

Why is it so rare in Scotland?

A Scottish sale becomes binding when the missives are concluded, which usually happens well before the equivalent of exchange in England and Wales. Once that’s done, there’s no room for a late bidder. Scotland also has Home Reports, so buyers have the key information before they offer. That combination is exactly what the government now wants south of the border.

What does it cost a buyer?

Everything spent before exchange is at risk: searches, survey, mortgage arrangement fees and legal costs. If the buyer has already agreed their own sale or given notice on a rented home, the damage can travel down the chain.

Gazumping is only one way a sale collapses. The government puts the share of sales that fall through, for any reason, at around one in three.

What is the government planning?

The home buying and selling reform roadmap, published on 19 June 2026, commits to two things that matter here. The first is mandatory sales packs, including searches and a property condition report, prepared before a property is marketed. The second is binding conditional contracts much earlier in the transaction, with penalties for pulling out without a valid reason and exceptions for situations such as a collapsed chain.

The order matters. Binding contracts need new legislation, which the government will introduce when parliamentary time allows, and they won’t come into force until sales packs are embedded. The target is the end of this Parliament. Until then, gazumping is exactly as legal as it was when we first wrote about it in 2022.

What can buyers do in the meantime?

Shorten the gap, and protect what’s spent inside it. Practical steps include:

getting a mortgage in principle before offering, so the seller sees a buyer who can move
instructing a conveyancer as soon as the offer is accepted, with ID and source of funds ready to go
asking for the property to come off the market as a condition of the offer
considering a lock-out (exclusivity) agreement for a fixed period

Some of the cost can be protected too. OneSearch Pledge is a warranty added to a search order that reimburses the searches in that order, up to £300, if the purchase falls through for one of the listed reasons. One of them is the seller accepting an offer at least £1,000 higher that the buyer is unwilling to match. It isn’t an insurance product, and the cost of Pledge itself isn’t refunded.

In Glasgow, the handshake and the contract arrive much closer together. In Gloucester there are still months between them, and the reforms that would close that gap are some way off.

Until they arrive, the best advice is to keep the gap as short as possible, and to make sure the money spent inside it isn’t money the client can’t afford to lose.

Of all the risks conveyancers deal with, Friday afternoon fraud is one of the most damaging. It does not rely on a defect in title or a missed search result. It relies on a single email arriving at the right moment with the wrong bank details.

Here is how it works, why the name undersells it, and what firms can do to stop it.

What is Friday afternoon fraud?

It is a form of payment diversion fraud. Criminals intercept and redirect legitimate property purchase funds by impersonating solicitors, estate agents or buyers. The aim is simple: persuade someone to send a deposit, completion monies or sale proceeds to an account the fraudster controls.

The numbers show why it persists. Between April 2024 and March 2025, 143 cases of conveyancing fraud were reported to Action Fraud, with losses of £11.7 million. The average loss was around £82,000, and victims were noticeably younger than for many frauds, with 32% aged 40–49 and 27% aged 30–39. For a first-time buyer, that is often everything they have saved.

Why Friday, and why does the name undersell it?

The name comes from timing. Completions often happen on a Friday, and the weekend buys criminals time to avoid detection. By the time anyone notices on Monday, the money has usually been moved on.

The name is also a little misleading, because it can happen on any day. The real pattern is not the day of the week. The scams are timed for the final stages of a transaction, when large sums are expected to move quickly. That can mean exchange, a deposit request or the release of sale proceeds, as well as completion.

How does the attack work?

There are two common routes. The fraudster either takes over a genuine email account or spoofs one with a lookalike domain, then sends “updated” bank details. A hijacked account is the more dangerous of the two, because the email really does come from the right address.

Compromised mailboxes are rarely used straight away. The fraudster will often read along for weeks, learning the matter, the names involved and the tone of the correspondence. The fake request then arrives at exactly the point a client is expecting to pay.

The weak point is not always the firm. Sometimes the solicitor has been hacked, but often the homebuyer has fallen for a phishing attack. That is why client education matters as much as internal security.

What are the warning signs?

Most fraudulent requests share a few features:

Bank details that change, or arrive for the first time, late in the transaction.
Small alterations to names, email addresses or company details, such as ‘m’ swapped for ‘rn’.
A reply-to address that differs from the sender address.
Pressure to pay quickly, often with a warning that any delay will cost the client the property.
An account name or bank that does not fit the firm.

None of these is conclusive on its own. Together, they are a reason to stop and check.

What should firms have in place?

The most effective control is a simple rule: bank details are never changed by email. Give clients the firm’s account details at the start, in the client care letter and ideally by a second route. Tell them plainly that the firm will never change them by email.

The NCA and Law Society guidance for property transactions comes down to three steps. Call before transferring money, because emails can be intercepted. Send a small test sum and confirm it has arrived. Do not transfer anything until you are satisfied the details are correct. The call has to go to a number already held on file, never one given in the suspicious email.

Beyond that, firms can:

Use multi-factor authentication on every mailbox.
Train staff to treat any change of payment details as a potential fraud until proven otherwise.
Put a fraud warning in email signatures and client care letters.
Use Confirmation of Payee checks as an extra layer, but not as the only one.

The same discipline applies in the other direction. When a seller client emails asking for proceeds to go to a new account, it deserves the same scrutiny as a buyer being asked to pay.

What happens if money goes to the wrong account?

Speed is everything. Contact the sending bank immediately, because the chances of recovery fall with every hour. The incident should also be reported to the national fraud reporting service.

Firms have regulatory duties too. In one case, an experienced solicitor was fined £10,000 and ordered to pay £16,000 in costs after being tricked into transferring more than £290,000 to a hacker. There was no dishonesty, but the SRA expects such cases to be reported, even where the stolen money has been replaced.

Friday afternoon fraud succeeds because it exploits the moment a transaction is most exposed: large sums, tight deadlines and clients who are expecting to pay. The technology behind it can be sophisticated, but the defence is not. A clear rule that bank details are never changed by email, backed by a phone call to a known number, stops most attacks.

The firms that avoid losses are rarely the ones with the most advanced systems. They are the ones where every member of staff, and every client, knows to stop when payment details change and to check before anything moves.

National Customer Service Week often focuses on the visible side of service: responding quickly, solving problems, and supporting customers when they need help.

But today’s theme, Service Culture to Improve Productivity, highlights something less obvious.

Productivity isn’t only about doing more in less time; it’s about removing the small points of friction that slow people down every day, and the challenge with friction is that it rarely announces itself.

The ‘it’s fine’ conundrum

A few months back, OneSearch Managing Director Liz Jarvis wrote about the kind of operational friction that becomes part of the working day without anyone really noticing.

The extra email you always have to send. The process that takes three steps when it should take one. The recurring issue you’ve experienced often enough that you’ve stopped expecting it to improve.

As Liz observed, these frustrations build up until they become background noise. For conveyancers, that’s an especially familiar experience. Transactions already involve enough moving parts, deadlines and competing priorities without stopping to question every small niggle. When something is mostly working, it’s often easier to work around it than challenge it.

The problem is that every workaround comes at a cost. Not necessarily a dramatic one – more often it’s measured in minutes rather than hours. But when those minutes are repeated hundreds or thousands of times across a year, they become something far more significant: a real drain on productivity.

Why service culture matters

This is where service culture enters the conversation. A strong service culture isn’t simply about being helpful, friendly or responsive, important though those things are.

At its best, service culture creates an environment where identifying and removing friction becomes everyone’s responsibility.

It encourages organisations to ask:

What’s making life harder for our customers?
Where are people spending time unnecessarily?
Which recurring frustrations have become accepted as “just the way things are”?

Those questions matter because productivity and customer experience are more closely linked than we often realise. When customers encounter fewer obstacles, they spend less time chasing updates, clarifying information or correcting avoidable issues. When teams understand where friction exists, they spend less time firefighting and more time delivering value.

The result isn’t just a better customer experience; it’s a more productive organisation.

The role of feedback

Of course, there’s one obvious challenge: you can’t fix the friction you don’t know exists. That’s why feedback is far more valuable than many organisations give it credit for.

Done properly, feedback isn’t a box-ticking exercise or a collection of compliments and complaints – it’s operational intelligence. It helps identify recurring bottlenecks before they become accepted practice. It reveals the gaps between how a process was designed to work and how customers actually experience it.

Most importantly, it helps organisations replace assumptions with evidence.

Why we opened a direct line

This summer, OneSearch launched a dedicated feedback channel for customers. The aim wasn’t simply to collect comments for a testimonial page or customer story. It was to create a direct route for customers to tell us where we’re getting things right and, just as importantly, where we’re creating unnecessary effort. Every submission is reviewed by our customer service team, led by Carol Dodd, because meaningful feedback deserves meaningful attention.

We’re still at the beginning of that journey, but we’re already convinced of one thing: the organisations that improve most consistently aren’t always the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated systems. They’re the ones that listen, learn and act.

A quick favour

If you’ve placed an order with OneSearch recently, we’d genuinely value your thoughts. Whether it’s turnaround times, communication, ease of use or something else entirely, every comment helps us build a clearer picture of where friction exists and where improvements can be made.

Because the goal isn’t simply better feedback – it’s better outcomes.

And as National Customer Service Week reminds us, better outcomes are often the result of a culture that listens, learns and continuously improves.

Landmark’s latest market research suggests the industry’s biggest challenge is no longer access to climate risk data, but interpreting it.

With 90% of conveyancers saying they would act sooner if climate information was easier to access and interpret, the opportunity is not more data, but helping professionals understand what matters, what it means and what happens next.

Key research takeaways

Climate risk is now considered as important as other mainstream due diligence checks by 82% of conveyancers.
90% of conveyancers would act sooner if information was easier to access and interpret.
Research suggests the next challenge is helping conveyancers interpret which risks matter, what they mean and what action they should advise.

Why more climate data doesn’t automatically create better decisions

As climate risk gains prominence, conveyancers often find themselves navigating an expanding range of datasets, reports and risk indicators. Yet, more information is not always synonymous with greater confidence.

Eighty per cent of conveyancers said that their organisation feels confident explaining what climate risk information does and doesn’t mean for a property. However, significant challenges remain around regulation, responsibility and consistent interpretation across the sector.

This suggests the conveyancing industry’s next challenge may not be information availability, but information relevance. “Conveyancers are busy people,” explains Elizabeth Jarvis, Managing Director at OneSearch. “They don’t necessarily need more data. They need confidence that they’re focusing on the information most relevant to the decision in front of them.”

Whether considering flood exposure, ground stability, heat stress or energy performance, understanding how different factors connect and which are most material can often be more valuable than simply receiving additional information.

Climate awareness is no longer the problem

Sixty per cent of conveyancers have seen increasing client concern around climate change over the past year, while more than four in five (82%) now view climate risk information as becoming as important as other mainstream due diligence checks.

For Elizabeth, this reflects a broader shift in market maturity. “Most conveyancers now recognise that climate considerations form part of the wider due diligence picture,” says Elizabeth. “The challenge is no longer building awareness. It’s helping people understand what information is relevant, what it means in context and how it should influence decision-making.”

Why interpretation is becoming as important as information

One of the most striking findings from the research is that 90% of conveyancers say they would act sooner if climate information was easier to access and interpret. At the same time, 80% believe climate risks are still being identified too late to prevent disruption in many transactions.

These results point to an important distinction. Access to data alone does not automatically lead to action. Identifying a potential climate-related risk is often only the beginning of a much wider process. Conveyancers still need to determine how relevant the finding is to a specific property, what level of concern it may warrant and whether any further investigation may be appropriate.

“A climate alert on its own rarely provides a complete picture,” says Elizabeth. “Conveyancers need help assessing the significance of that finding within the context of the property, the transaction and the decision they’re trying to make. That’s where interpretation becomes incredibly important.”

Download the report

Landmark’s latest market research report, Climate change in the property sector 2026, explores how conveyancers, estate agents and mortgage lenders are responding to climate risk, where the biggest challenges remain and why interpretation is becoming just as important as climate risk data itself.

The findings suggest the industry’s next phase of maturity will not be defined by access to more data, but by helping professionals focus on what matters, understand it in context and apply it with confidence.

Download the report to explore the full findings and discover why clearer, more interpretable climate insight could be one of the property sector’s biggest opportunities.

National Customer Service Week kicks off with a question many organisations are still trying to answer: as technology becomes more capable, what should people focus on instead?

It’s a conversation which is become increasingly difficult to ghost. Artificial intelligence is advancing quicker than you can type it out. Automation now handles tasks that once required hours of manual, and mental, effort. Systems can process information, trigger workflows and deliver updates in moments. For businesses and their customers, that’s largely a good thing.

But today’s National Customer Service Week theme, Tech Powered, Human Enhanced?, isn’t really about what technology can do; it’s about what people should do when technology does more.

Technology is at its best when nobody notices it

In conveyancing, there are plenty of moving parts where technology earns its place: search ordering, for the most part, can be streamlined, most updates can be automated, and information can be retrieved and delivered faster than ever before. These improvements matter because they take the slog out of the process, reducing unnecessary admin, cutting delays and giving customers quicker access to the search data they need.

Few conveyancers would argue for going back to manual ways of working simply for the sake of it. After all, the best technology doesn’t create more work; it quietly removes it.

But not every problem is a data problem

Picture a search that comes back clean on paper, but one result doesn’t quite sit right alongside the rest of the file. Nothing is technically wrong. The data is accurate. But there’s a client asking questions and an exchange date getting closer, and what the conveyancer needs now isn’t more information; it’s someone who can explain what that information actually means.

Moments like that happen every day across the property sector: a result raises an unexpected question, two pieces of information don’t seem to align, or a result is technically correct but needs interpreting before it’s genuinely useful. They’re a big part of what our team deals with, and they’re often the moments customers remember most – because at that point, the value isn’t in accessing more information. It’s in understanding it.

That’s where human judgement still matters, not because technology isn’t a great asset, but because experience and reassurance remain difficult things to automate.

The real opportunity isn’t replacing people

It’s worth pausing here, because this is perhaps the most important point of all: technology and people aren’t competing against each other. The firms getting this right aren’t choosing one over the other. They’re using technology to handle routine, repeatable tasks so their people can focus on the situations that demand expertise, problem-solving and judgement.

In a nutshell, technology should make customer service more human, not less.

When repetitive tasks take less time, teams have more capacity to answer questions, resolve issues and support customers through more complex situations. That isn’t replacing the human element – it’s creating more room for it.

What this means at OneSearch

At OneSearch, that’s how we think about technology. We want processes to be efficient, routine tasks to take less effort, and our customers to get their information quickly and reliably.

But we also recognise that some situations still call for speaking to somebody who understands the context, can apply experience and can give a straight answer when it matters. That means treating technology as an enabler rather than a replacement. Used well, it helps us spend less time on admin and more time supporting customers – and ultimately, that’s what good customer service has always been about.

Tell us how we’re doing

That’s also why we want to hear from you. If you’ve ordered a search or spoken to our team recently, let us know how it went – what worked, what didn’t, and where we could make things easier.