Should you find somewhere within your price range that you like, you should make sure that you visit it a few times and try to get a feel for the neighbourhood. You should make an offer on the property through the estate agent, or you may need to haggle with the seller. Don't offer too much, try and negotiate. Eventually, should your offer be accepted you can go to your mortgage lender to tell them you've found a place.

Unfortunately, it is still true that even if your offer is accepted, in England that is not the end of it. Someone else can come in with a higher offer, which could be accepted, unless you offer a higher amount. This is known as gazumping.

Your lender will ask you to fill in a mortgage application form, and once this is sent in, the lender will commission a valuation report, a check to check your property is a reasonable risk for the lender. You may need to pay the bill for the valuation. You should also get a full structural survey if you are buying an older property. Should the valuation come up with a lower figure than your offer, you need to inform the seller and try to negotiate a lower price. If you can't do this, you need to decide if you are prepared to pay over the odds or pull out of the deal. The lender will make a formal mortgage offer should they be happy with the valuation, your employer, bank and previous lender or landlord references.

Your legal work should be done by a qualified solicitor or licensed conveyancer. They will liaise with the lender and sort out your mortgage documentation, draw up sale contracts with the vendor's solicitor and conduct searches with the local authority to see if any plans will affect the property. With the vendor's solicitor, they will agree what is included in the sale and what the moving dates will be.

Once everything is satisfactory, contracts are exchanged, and you will need to pay a deposit, normally 10% of the purchase price, which will be non-refundable should you pull out. Your completion date is set here, which could be more or less than four weeks. You need to have buildings insurance at this point.

On the day of completion you should collect the keys from the estate agent and you are now legally the owner of the property. Move your belongings in and enjoy your new home!

CONVEYANCING

How does conveyancing, the legal work for the mortgage, work?

Conveyancing is the legal transfer of the ownership of either leasehold or freehold properties. It is a process fraught with complications, but can be completed in an afternoon if all goes right, but could take several months to complete if there are problems.

The sale and purchase of a leasehold property is more complicated that with a freehold property. You must find out what kind your property is, and should it be leasehold, you should find out what the financial restrictions imposed by the leasehold are as well as the conditions and restrictions.

A solicitor or licensed conveyancer should be used for the transfer of property ownership. You need to be 101% sure that you will have exclusive rights over the land. These legal professionals will have insurance in case something goes wrong and you have comeback against them.

They will charge you anything from a few hundred pounds to up to a few thousand pounds to complete a purchase or handle a sale. The price depends on the transaction's complexity and the value of the property.

For this reason you should shop around and compare prices, but most importantly you should use someone you can trust, because fraud and corner-cutting amongst solicitors is becoming more common.

The conveyancing process starts with the investigation, where draft documentation is provided by the seller's conveyancer to the buyer's conveyancer. Then pre-contract enquiries are carried out, where the buyer's conveyancer asks the seller questions about disputes with neighbours or alterations to the policy. Then there is the local authority search, where the register of local land charges is looked at to find out about any plans that could affect the property. This could take between four and six weeks, and is required by the mortgage lender.

The next stage in the process is the assessment of draft contracts, where the conveyancer checks that the wording of the contracts is correct and unambiguous. With a leasehold property, the apportionment of expenses is checked thoroughly and the terms of maintenance and management of the property are checked. The deposit on the exchange of contracts is negotiated here as well as the time between exchange and completion.

The exchange of contracts is the first time there is a binding contract between the buyer and seller. The completion date is set and you need to get building insurance. Your conveyancer will check neither the buyer not seller has a bankruptcy notice against them. Finally, title searches at the Land registry are carried out.

On completion day, funds are transferred and the buyer gets access to the property. Finally, stamp duty is paid, and the purchaser is registered with the land registry. Title deeds are sent to the mortgage lender.