TL;DR
Conveyancing searches are the legal checks your solicitor commissions after your offer is accepted, before you exchange contracts. They are designed to answer a narrow set of questions: is the title clean, who is responsible for the road and drains, is the land contaminated, has it flooded, was it mined. They are thorough on what they cover and silent on everything else.
Searches usually cost £250–£500 in total and are the slowest non-mortgage part of a purchase. Critically, they happen after you have offered and instructed a solicitor — by which point you are emotionally and financially committed. The questions that should shape *whether and how much you offer* — broadband speed, crime patterns, real school catchments, day-to-day flood context, what nearby homes actually sold for — are mostly not in the legal searches at all. That is the gap this guide is about. You can pull most of them in one £14.95 report before you offer.
What searches are for — and when they happen
The purpose of a search is legal protection, not buyer education. Your solicitor (and your mortgage lender) needs to know that the title is good, that the property has the legal rights it needs to function — access, drainage, water — and that there is no known liability or hazard that would make the lender's security worthless. Most lenders will not release funds without a satisfactory local authority and drainage search.
Searches protect the transaction, and protect the lender. They are not designed to tell you whether you'll like living there, whether the broadband is usable, or whether you're paying £30,000 over the odds. Those are your problems to solve, ideally before you commit.
The Local Authority search (LLC1 + CON29)
This is the big one, and the slowest. LLC1 (the Local Land Charges register) lists charges and restrictions registered against the property: financial charges, planning conditions, tree preservation orders, conservation-area status, listed-building status. CON29 is a set of standard questions answered by the council, covering planning permissions and refusals affecting the property, building regulations completion certificates, whether the road fronting the property is publicly maintained (adopted), enforcement notices, and proposals for new roads within 200 metres.
Timing is the headache. Some councils return CON29 results in 48 hours; others, chronically under-resourced, take six weeks or more. This single search is the most common reason a "ready to exchange" purchase stalls.
Drainage and water (CON29DW)
Commissioned from the regional water company, this confirms whether the property is connected to the public water main, whether foul water is connected to the public sewer, and whether any public sewers or water mains cross the land. A public sewer running under the back garden can block where you're allowed to build an extension.
The environmental search
A desktop report compiled from public datasets that pulls together contaminated-land risk — historic industrial use, old landfill, petrol stations — alongside flood screening, ground stability and radon potential. Under Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, a current owner can in principle inherit liability for remediating contaminated land, so a "further action" result triggers a follow-up assessment or an indemnity. The flood screen here is area-level; the underlying data largely comes from the Environment Agency, DEFRA and the British Geological Survey.
The optional searches: flood, coal, chancel
Flood (detailed). Where the environmental screen flags risk, solicitors order a dedicated property-level flood report built on Environment Agency modelling. It matters for insurability and price — properties in higher flood-risk bands can face steep premiums, partly mitigated by Flood Re for eligible homes built before 2009.
Coal mining (CON29M). Ordered automatically when the postcode falls within a former coalfield. Relevant across large parts of the Midlands, the North, South Wales and central Scotland — and easy to forget where you wouldn't expect it.
Chancel repair. A medieval liability, usually dealt with by a cheap one-off indemnity policy rather than a full search.
What searches do NOT cover
Here is the honest part. There's a large category of things that materially affect whether a home is right for you — and what it's worth — that legal searches simply do not address.
The problem is timing. By the time searches run, you've offered, paid for a survey, instructed a solicitor and told everyone you're moving. If the broadband turns out to be 8 Mbps, or three near-identical homes sold for £25k less last quarter, you find out too late to act cleanly on it.
Do this before you offer, not after
The fix is to front-load the questions searches won't answer. Almost all of it is public and free at source:
Pulling these together by hand means seven or eight government portals and a spreadsheet. That's what our £14.95 property report automates: one PDF, every source cited with a retrieval date, for any English or Welsh address before you offer. It's a one-off £14.95 — no subscription — and it is explicitly not a replacement for legal searches or a survey. You can also start free: search an area to see the postcode picture, then pay only when you're serious about a specific address.
Honest caveats
The pattern to remember is sequence: desk due-diligence before you offer, survey and legal searches after the offer is agreed.