What Does a Solicitor Do When Buying a House in Ireland?

The surveyor checks the building, the estate agent works for the seller — and the solicitor is the one professional in an Irish purchase who is entirely on your side of the table. But most first-time buyers sign their engagement letter without knowing what conveyancing actually involves: what gets investigated, when the money moves, and which risks are legally yours to carry. Here is what your solicitor does between sale agreed and getting the keys, what it costs, and the checks that are nobody's job but yours.

“Conveyancing” is the legal transfer of the property from the seller to you. Irish conveyancing runs on caveat emptor — buyer beware — so the process exists to surface problems before you are contractually committed. In a typical second-hand purchase:

1. You pay a booking deposit to the estate agent once your offer is accepted. It holds the property while the legal work starts, and it is refundable until you sign contracts — going sale agreed does not bind either side.
2. The seller's solicitor issues the contract pack with the title documents. Since 1 January 2019, under the Law Society of Ireland's Conditions of Sale 2019 Edition, title is investigated before contracts are signed: the standard objections and requisitions on title travel with the contract, so the issues that used to emerge after signing are now dealt with up front.
3. Your solicitor investigates and raises queries — title, boundaries, rights of way, planning documents for any extension, compliance certificates, management-company details for an apartment, and the standard searches against the property and the seller.
4. You sign contracts and pay the contract deposit (customarily 10% of the price, less the booking deposit already paid) once your solicitor is satisfied — and once your mortgage offer, and any Help to Buy or First Home Scheme approvals, are in place. When both sides have signed and the deposit is paid, the deal is binding.
5. Closing: your solicitor requests the mortgage funds, does the final closing searches on the morning of completion, hands over the balance, and collects the deeds and keys. After closing they pay your stamp duty to Revenue and register your ownership with Tailte Éireann, Ireland's property-registration authority.

There is no fixed timetable for any of this. A clean second-hand purchase with a ready buyer and seller can move quickly; probate sales, chains, title defects, and slow replies to requisitions are what stretch a purchase out. Your solicitor cannot control the other side — but instructing one early, before you even bid, removes the one delay that is yours.

The value of conveyancing is in the questions a lay buyer would never think to ask. The core of the work:

• Good marketable title — that the seller actually owns what they are selling, that the boundaries in the deeds match what you viewed, and that no undisclosed mortgage, charge or judgment attaches to it.
• Rights and burdens — rights of way over the property, shared drains and access, restrictive covenants, and for apartments the lease terms, service charges and sinking fund.
• Planning and building compliance — that extensions and alterations have permission or are exempt, with the architect's certificates to prove it. (Whether the extension is structurally sound is the surveyor's question, not the solicitor's.)
• Outgoings — that Local Property Tax is paid up and correctly apportioned at closing (the LPT guide covers who pays in the year you buy), along with any management charges.
• The money mechanics — drawing down your mortgage, filing the stamp-duty return, and registering the transfer and your lender's charge with Tailte Éireann.

Solicitors in Ireland set their own fees, and you are entitled to a written estimate (a Section 150 letter) before the work starts. Published provider prices typically put the professional fee for a residential purchase at €1,500–€3,000 plus VAT, with some firms advertising lower flat fees and others charging a percentage of the price. On top of the fee come the outlays paid to third parties:

When you compare quotes, compare the professional fee — the outlays and the stamp duty will be broadly the same whoever acts for you, and a headline “from” price sometimes excludes VAT and outlays that a fuller quote includes.

A solicitor's file is about the legal property. Two whole categories of risk sit outside it:

• The building. No solicitor inspects the roof, the wiring or the damp. That is the pre-purchase survey, and under caveat emptor a structural defect found after signing is generally your problem — which is why your solicitor will tell you to survey before you sign.
• The location's records. OPW flood zones and recorded flood events, EPA radon classification, mica and pyrite scheme designations, planning applications pending next door, recorded sold prices on the street: all public records, none of them part of standard conveyancing searches. The requisitions ask the seller about notices served on them — not what the official datasets say about the area.