Charge for the Years, Not the Hours

Errors in a property transfer tend to surface at the deeds office, or years later when an owner wants to build, so a conveyancer's fee pays for knowing where those errors hide far more than for the hours spent on the file. The hours are real but small. Reading a title deed and noticing a servitude that lets the municipality run a sewer line across the back of the stand takes minutes, once someone has learned to look for it. So does spotting an old condition that limits what may be built, or knowing that a sale out of a deceased estate needs the executor's authority before anything can be signed. Each of those was learned over years, often on files that went wrong, and the examiners at the deeds office are not forgiving about documents that are almost right.

Measuring the fee by the afternoon of paperwork is like paying a mechanic only for the minutes he spent listening to the engine. The logic cuts both ways, though. A fee charged for experience obliges the conveyancer to bring all of it to every file, the dull ones included, because the costly mistake is most often sitting in the transfer that looked routine and was handled by whoever had a spare hour.