When you make an offer on a house, most people assume the solicitor’s searches will pick up anything important: planning history, flood risk, contamination, dodgy boundaries, the lot. That’s roughly true, but with two large catches that don’t get talked about enough.
- The first is timing: Solicitor searches don’t start until after your offer is accepted and you’ve formally instructed a solicitor. By then, you’ve already committed money, time and emotional energy to a property you might end up walking away from.
- The second is scope: Standard searches answer a fairly narrow set of questions about the property itself. They don’t always give you the wider context: what’s happened on neighbouring streets, what the area looks like, what comparable homes have sold for, or what the EPC says the home will cost to run.
This is a plain-English guide to what conveyancing searches actually cover, when they happen, what they cost, and the gaps that buyers most often run into.
The four searches almost every solicitor orders
In England and Wales, four searches make up the standard pack for a residential purchase. Your solicitor (or licensed conveyancer) will usually order these as standard, and mortgage lenders generally expect equivalent searches to be carried out.
Local authority search (LLC1 and CON29): This is the big one. It pulls together what the council knows about the property and the road it sits on. It covers planning decisions and refusals, building regulations approvals, enforcement notices, listed building status, conservation area designation, tree preservation orders, road adoption status, contaminated land entries, and whether any improvement or compulsory purchase orders are in play. Some councils return results in days; others take weeks.
Drainage and water search (CON29DW): Ordered from the local water company. It confirms whether the property is connected to mains water and sewerage, where the public sewers run (which matters if you ever want to build over them), who’s responsible for maintenance, and how you’re billed.
Environmental search: A desktop report drawn from public datasets and commercial environmental data. It flags contaminated land risk, historic landfill nearby, ground stability and subsidence risk, radon potential, and flood risk (river, coastal, surface water and groundwater). This is the search that surfaces most “environmental red flag” issues, but only as a risk indicator, not a survey.
Chancel repair check: A quick check to see if the property sits within a parish where homeowners could historically be liable for repairs to the local church. Real liabilities are rare now, and many solicitors still include either a chancel check or a low-cost indemnity policy as part of the process.Together these four typically cost somewhere in the low-to-mid hundreds of pounds, depending on the council, the water company, and the search provider your solicitor uses.
Searches that get added depending on where the property is
On top of the standard pack, your solicitor will order area-specific searches when the location calls for it.
- Coal mining search: anywhere in a former coalfield (large parts of the Midlands, the North and South Wales).
- Tin, clay, brine or limestone mining searches: Cornwall, Cheshire, the Mendips and a few other specific areas.
- Cheshire salt search: a regional quirk worth knowing if you’re buying in the salt belt.
- Highways search: useful where the road’s adoption status isn’t clear from the local search.
- Specialist flood report: if the environmental search flags a high flood risk, your solicitor may recommend a dedicated flood appraisal.
If your solicitor doesn’t mention these and the property is in a relevant area, ask.
When the searches actually happen
This is the part that catches most first-time buyers out. The order of events for a typical purchase looks like this:
- You view the property.
- You make an offer.
- The offer is accepted.
- You instruct a solicitor.
- The solicitor sends out the searches.
- Results usually come back within the next two to six weeks.
- The solicitor reviews them and raises enquiries with the seller’s side.
- Issues get resolved (or don’t), and you decide whether to exchange.
The searches sit at step five. By that point, you’ve already committed. You’ve taken the property off the market, started paying solicitor fees, and probably begun lining up a mortgage offer and survey. If a search comes back ugly and you walk away, you typically lose what you’ve already spent on legal fees, search fees and the survey, even though you haven’t bought anything yet. That bill is commonly a few hundred to over a thousand pounds, depending on how far things got.
Researching a shortlist? You can pull planning history, flood risk, EPC and sold price context for any UK address in a Property Looker report before you put in an offer. It won’t replace your solicitor’s searches; it gives you the data context to decide which properties are worth taking to that stage in the first place and the equips you with all the questions to ask sellers and property professionals.
Four things standard searches don’t cover well
Solicitor searches are good at what they do. But there are four recurring gaps worth knowing about, because they’re the ones that make buyers wish they’d looked sooner.
1. They’re done after you’ve committed
Already covered above, but it’s the headline gap. Much of what solicitor searches surface ultimately comes from public or commercially accessible datasets that exist now, before you’ve made an offer. The reason buyers don’t usually see it earlier isn’t that the information is locked away; it’s that nobody routinely pulls it together at the right stage.
2. They’re about the property, not the surrounding area
A local authority search will tell you whether there’s an enforcement notice on the house you’re buying. It generally won’t tell you that the field behind it has an outline application for forty homes, or that the empty plot two streets over has been earmarked for student accommodation in the council’s local plan.
Some of that turns up if you order an optional “planning search” extra (sometimes called a Plansearch or similar), but the standard searches focus primarily on the property itself rather than giving a broad picture of planning activity in the wider area.
In practice, this is where buyers get surprised most often after moving in. The house was fine; it was what happened next door.
3. They’re a snapshot, not a history
A standard search confirms current status: current planning permissions, current contamination registrations, current flood zone classification. It’s less informative about patterns over time: how often the property has been refused permission, how the area’s flood-defence picture has changed, how many planning applications neighbours have made and what got pushed through, what the property has sold for in past cycles and whether the asking price is in line with that history.
For negotiation purposes, that historical picture is often what tells you whether a property is fairly priced, and standard searches don’t give it to you.
4. They don’t tell you what the home will cost to run
Energy performance is part of the buying picture that conveyancing searches simply aren’t designed to surface. The EPC is a separate document attached to the property listing, and it’s where the home’s running cost story lives: current rating, potential rating, the specific improvements the assessor recommended, and whether the certificate is still valid.If you’re comparing two homes at similar prices, the EPC often tells you more about long-term affordability than the searches do. Property Looker shows the EPC on each property profile alongside the planning and flood data, so you can see the running-cost picture in the same place as the risk picture.
A quick note: searches are not surveys
It’s worth flagging because buyers conflate them all the time. Conveyancing searches, a mortgage valuation, and a Level 2 or Level 3 survey are three different things that answer three different questions.Searches are paper exercises; they tell you what’s on record about the property and the land. A mortgage valuation is a quick inspection done for the lender’s benefit, not yours. A survey is a physical inspection by a qualified surveyor and is the only one of the three that tells you whether the roof leaks, the boiler’s on its last legs, or there’s damp behind the kitchen units. None of the others will catch that.If a property is worth buying, it’s almost always worth a proper survey on top of the searches.
What you can, and should, check before you offer
Most of the data your solicitor will pull after your offer is accepted exists in public databases right now. None of it is private. The trick is knowing where to look and how to read it.
A sensible pre-offer checklist:
- Planning history for the property: Has the current or previous owner applied for anything? Was it approved, refused, or withdrawn? Refusals are sometimes more informative than approvals; they tell you what the council has already said no to on this plot.
- Planning activity nearby: Pending applications on adjoining sites, recent approvals on the same street, any large allocations in the local plan. This is where future-quality-of-life risk lives.
- Flood risk: River, coastal, surface water and groundwater. The government’s flood-risk tool is free; PL’s report shows it alongside the other context.
- EPC: Current rating, potential rating, when the certificate expires, and what the assessor flagged. If the EPC is old or missing, that itself is information.
- Sold prices and comparables: What has this property sold for before? What have similar homes on the same street, in the same condition, sold for in the last twelve months? This is the data behind any sensible offer.
- Conservation area, listed status, Article 4 directions: These massively affect what you can and can’t do with a property. Worth knowing before you fall in love with the idea of an extension.
None of this replaces your solicitor’s searches. It tells you whether the property is worth getting to the search stage.
How to think about the two stages
The clean way to picture it:
- Pre-offer due diligence: public data, address-specific context, planning history, flood, EPC, sold prices. Tells you whether the property is worth pursuing and what a fair offer looks like.
- Post-offer searches: formal conveyancing searches, environmental report, water and drainage, chancel, plus any area-specific add-ons. Tells you whether the property is legally and practically safe to buy and gives your lender what they need.
Both matter. They answer different questions. The mistake is treating the post-offer searches as the only stage where you “really check” the property; by then, you’ve already locked in costs that a different question, asked earlier, might have saved you.
Before you make an offer, get the full picture of the address
Pull planning history, flood risk, EPC and sold price context for any UK address with a Property Looker report. It’s the data your solicitor will reach for later, surfaced now, when it can still change your offer.