Conveyancing
Websites for conveyancing attorneys.
A conveyancing practice is judged on two things it cannot control — how long the deeds office takes, and how long the council takes — and on one it can: whether the client knows where they stand. That is a website problem before it is anything else.
The example website
- Firm
- Whiteacre Property Law
- Practice
- Conveyancing
- Pages, all of them working
- 7 pages
The example site
Whiteacre Property Law
Conveyancing · Hatfield, Pretoria · 7 pages
A two-conveyancer practice in Hatfield, Pretoria. Seven pages, all of them working.
The firm is invented — the name comes out of a law textbook — and every page of the site says so at the top. Everything else on it is real: every link goes somewhere, and every page is written.
What a conveyancing website has to do
Answer “where is my transfer?” before it is asked
It is the commonest call your secretary takes and the least billable minute in the practice. The answer is almost always the same — waiting on the council, waiting on the bank, waiting on the deeds office — and almost never bad news. A site that shows it stops the call without anybody being fobbed off.
Satisfy the agent and the buyer at once
Most instructions arrive through an estate agent, not through the public. The agent is deciding whether you will make them look good; the buyer has never done this before and is frightened of the number. Those are different readers and most conveyancing sites are written for neither.
Publish the arithmetic, not a quote form
Most of what a client pays on a transfer is not your fee. It is transfer duty to SARS, the deeds office, rates clearance, and the bond attorney. A site that shows the split is doing you a favour: it moves the conversation off your fee and onto the total, where you look reasonable.
Work on a phone, in the evening
Nobody checks the progress of their transfer at a desk. They check it on a phone, at the kitchen table, after the agent has said something vague. If the site is unreadable there, it does not exist.
Three decisions, and why
Each picture below is a screenshot of a real page on that site, not a drawing of one.
The whole site is a status line
The home page carries a live file — property, stage, who we are waiting on, how long it has been, and the expected registration month. Not a promise that we communicate well. The thing itself, on the first screen, with the line underneath it that makes the point: every client sees this, and nobody has to ask for it.
Every page is a stage, not a service
The navigation reads The transfer, Costs, Bonds, Selling — the client’s journey, not our practice areas. The transfer page names all eight stages in plain language and says who is holding each one up, which is usually the council and almost never the attorney. A client who can name the stage they are on stops phoning to find out.
The costs are published with their arithmetic
Transfer duty bands, conveyancing fee, deeds office, rates clearance, all set out with the figures and the date they came into effect. A buyer arriving from a portal wants a number, and giving it before they ask is the cheapest trust you will ever buy.
What it costs
Rebuilding the site you have is R8,500. A new one is R12,500 for a sole practitioner and R18,000 for two to five attorneys. Looking after it afterwards is from R1,950 a month. Every figure is published, so you can hold it against anybody else’s quote without asking us first.
Questions
- Do we have to redesign? We are happy with how ours looks.
- No. If you are happy with the look we rebuild it looking the same. What changes is underneath — it loads faster, there is nothing left to hack, and somebody is watching it. A rebuild of an existing site is R8,500.
- Most of our work comes from agents. Does that change anything?
- It changes what the site has to do first. An agent is deciding whether referring you makes them look good, so the pages that matter most are the ones showing how a client is kept informed and what the costs are. Both are on the example site.
- Does the status line mean we have to update the website constantly?
- No. On the example site it is a worked example, not a live feed. Building a real one that reads from your practice management system is possible and is quoted separately — but most firms find the published stages and costs do the work on their own.
- Who owns it?
- You do. The domain is registered in your firm’s name from the first day, the content and photographs are yours, and so is the data the site collects. Twelve months, then month to month on sixty days’ notice.
Read next
Send us your firm’s web address.
We go through it against a written list of 69 checks and email you the six problems worth fixing first, each in one sentence, with what we measured. It costs nothing and we do not telephone you afterwards.