Auction conveyancing: managing the completion deadline

An auction purchase turns the usual order of a conveyancing file upside down. On a traditional auction, contracts exchange on the fall of the hammer - so the legal pack review, the special conditions, the additional costs and the funding all have to be dealt with before the auction date, not after. Then completion follows on a fixed timetable, commonly 20 working days, with contractual interest and a notice to complete waiting for a buyer who misses it.

The modern method of auction softens the first part but not the second. The buyer pays a non-refundable reservation fee, contracts then have to exchange within 28 days, and completion follows on its own deadline. Either way, the file has two hard dates, and everything else has to be planned backwards from them.

That is why Noviqent runs auction files on their own pipelines. Set the auction date and the pre-auction report is due the day before it, with the lender's confirmation that it can complete in time due alongside. Mark contracts as exchanged and the completion deadline is set automatically, with a completion-risk check due a week before it and a warning on the file as the date approaches. Sellers' files track the same dates from the other side: the legal pack issued to the auctioneer two weeks out, the addendum the day before, and the completion deadline monitored after exchange.

The point is not the reminders themselves - it is that every auction file in the firm is visible by stage on one board, so a supervisor can see at a glance which buyers are a week from their deadline with a mortgage offer still outstanding.