Re: Average solicitor's fees?
Just to come back for a brief further comment on
"fee structure which is proportional to property value (a justification I would be grateful to see given). " I didn't actually say this, and I should perhaps have gone into further detail.
Most solicitors (myself included) no longer charge a fee which is a proportion of the sale price. For most houses in the €160k-500k bracket, I would be charging a fee of about €1200 plus V.A.T. for a sale.
However, when one gets up the value chain a little, the value of the work tends to increase, the level of scrutiny gets a touch more obsessive, and you certainly cannot delegate the work to someone who is quite junior. So my "flat fee" on such a transaction might be a fair bit higher.
For example:
1. At €500k, you have to get a CGT cert to complete the sale (or there will be a 15% withholding from the sale proceeds). Not a big job, but extra work nonetheless.
2. At a mortgage of, say, €1.5m, the interest on the loan cheque is running at nearly a grand a week. Not so bad if you are getting a cheque from BOI\AIB or one of the other lenders who only charge interest when the cheque is cashed. But PTSB charge interest from the day after they send the cheque, and other lenders send the money direct to your account. So you had better be utterly sure that your completion is planned like a military operation, and you are less likely to give yourself the cushion of allowing the money to be drawn down a couple of days before you need it.
3. The contents of a €2m house (if contents are passing) will tend to be more than a fridge, microwave and a power city special offer telly. I have on occasion had to go through a 100 item inventory at contract and again prior to completion.
4. The single reason which contributes most to a higher fee is that when you move up the value chain, you are usually dealing with a client who is happy to pay more. They pay more because they believe it is worth more. My job, in marketing terms, is to ensure that the clients have a transaction experience which justifies this view. These are not uninformed consumers but savvy business people (actually, this is more true in the case of purchases - but I don't have a big pool of old widows selling up in Ballsbridge and paying me silly money out of ignorance, before you ask). The higher value clients are happy to pay a premium knowing that they can ring me out of hours, that I will drop everything to help them when they have something desperately urgent, and that they are getting a senior and experienced person on the job. It is the same reason that the banks can charge more to their high net worth customers under the "private banking" umbrella. In short, on a higher value transaction - like on any other - I charge what the market will bear, and it so happens that this market will bear more than €999 + V.A.T. I love the free market.
