solicitor fees on topup mortgage

At present buying a house as an investment. As part of the financing I am topping up my mortgage by 70 k on my private mortgage. The solicitor tells me that this top up mortgage is additional work for him and in charging me €540 extra plus costs on top of the original conveyancing fee agreed. This seems excessive to me as I checked with the bank and they say he needs to stamp the deeds and check deeds. These deeds have already been checked by solicitor when I bought house a number of years ago. Is this a fair price? Is there anyway I can compare this price to others?

Legally speaking, the top-up mortgage is a totally separate transaction to the purchase and mortgage of the investment property, so your solicitor is quite correct to charadcerise this as extra work.

The €540 fee (not clear if this is inclusive or exclusive of V.A.T.) does not seem excessive, but as the top-up is a separate transaction, you should feel perfectly free to shop around to see if you can get better value. Frankly, I doubt if you will get it an awful lot cheaper, because your solicitor is in a better position to handle this (being already familiar with this title) than a new solicitor.