The seller has no advocate until they instruct one.

And by then, the clock has already started.

Between deciding to sell and accepting an offer, the seller is the least informed person in the transaction and the only one carrying its risk. Your conveyancer owes you a duty, but only from instruction — which is after the offer. The agent is paid on completion. The buyer’s surveyor works for the buyer.

So the eight weeks between listing and an offer, which is exactly when the paperwork could be sorted, are spent waiting. Then the enquiries start, and every answer begins a new multi-week wait.

What we do

We read the public record for your address — the energy certificate, planning constraints, what is recorded about extensions, heating and glazing — and tell you which questions your sale is likely to turn on, ordered by how long each takes to answer.

Then, in the pack, we work through them properly: where each document comes from, what it costs, and the traps where acting on instinct removes an option you wanted.

The line we don’t cross

This is information and preparation. It is not legal advice and it isnot conveyancing. We do not act in your transaction, deal with the buyer’s solicitor, draft contracts, complete your property forms, or handle money. Every customer still instructs a conveyancer.

The register throughout is “this is likely to come up, here is what it is, here is roughly what it costs — discuss it with your conveyancer”. Never “here is what you should do”.

That boundary is not defensive. It is what makes us useful: we are not competing with your conveyancer, we are trying to make their job take weeks instead of months.

What we won’t claim

You will see a lot of marketing saying a third of house sales fall through and that preparation prevents it. Around a quarter of listings suffer at least one fall-through, and of the sales that fail, only a minority fail on legal or paperwork issues. Most collapse because a mortgage was refused or a survey went badly, and no amount of preparation fixes those.

What preparation does is shorten the transaction — and almost everything that goes wrong becomes more likely the longer yours runs. It also puts you in a position to say no when a buyer asks for money off at survey stage, which is the more common and more expensive problem, and one that affects the majority who complete rather than the minority who don’t.

Where we work

England and Wales. Scotland has the Home Report system and a different legal framework — building warrants rather than building regulations, a different property questionnaire, and a different transaction shape. We would rather say we don’t cover it than guess. Northern Ireland is not covered yet either.

Who runs this

Prepared Seller is built by a small UK team with deep links in the property industry.