Property Practice for FLK2: Conveyancing Steps and SDLT Basics

Property Practice is the subject that makes people who have never worked in a conveyancing department feel like they have turned up to the wrong exam. There is a vocabulary problem before there is a law problem. Requisitions on title. TR1. Form OS1. The Standard Conditions of Sale. Overriding interests. None of it is conceptually difficult, but if you have spent three years reading Contract and Tort cases, the sudden shift to transactional sequence feels alien.

Here is the good news, and it is genuinely good. FLK2 Property Practice is one of the most learnable subjects in the whole of SQE1, because the examiner is testing a process. Processes have a fixed order. Fixed orders can be memorised, drilled, and then applied to fact patterns with a fairly high hit rate. Compare that to Trusts, where the same set of facts can plausibly generate three different answers depending on how you characterise the intention. Property rewards diligence in a way that some subjects simply do not.

Let me walk you through what actually comes up, and where candidates lose marks they should not lose.

Why Property Practice sits where it does in FLK2

A quick orientation, because it matters for how you allocate revision hours. SQE1 is two assessments — FLK1 and FLK2 — each 180 single-best-answer multiple-choice questions, sat in two sessions of 2 hours 33 minutes on the same day. FLK2 carries six subjects: Property Practice, Wills and the Administration of Estates, Solicitors Accounts, Land Law, Trusts, and Criminal Law and Practice.

Property Practice and Land Law are neighbours, and the SRA is quite happy to blur the boundary. A question might give you a co-ownership problem dressed in a conveyancing suit: the seller is one of two joint proprietors, the other has died, and you are asked what the buyer's solicitor should do about the restriction on the register. Is that Land Law or Property Practice? Both. The functioning legal knowledge is assessed as an integrated whole, and pretending the two subjects live in separate boxes is a revision mistake.

So revise them together. When you learn overreaching, learn it in the context of a buyer's solicitor advising on a purchase from surviving trustees — not as an abstract doctrine.

What "practice" actually means for the examiner

The distinction that trips people up: Land Law asks who owns what and with what rights. Property Practice asks what does the solicitor do, when, and why. The second question is almost always framed from a particular side of the transaction. Are you acting for the buyer? The seller? The lender? Your answer changes.

Get into the habit — from day one of revision — of asking "whose solicitor am I?" before you read the options. It sounds trivial. It is not. A meaningful chunk of wrong answers in this subject come from candidates giving the technically correct advice to the wrong client.

The conveyancing timeline, in the order examiners expect

Learn this as a spine. Everything else hangs off it.

1. Taking instructions and client care. Identity checks, source of funds, conflict check, costs information. Also the point at which you decide whether you can act for buyer and lender, or buyer and seller, at all — the conduct overlay is never far away.
2. Pre-contract stage — the seller's package. Seller's solicitor deduces title (official copies of the register and title plan for registered land; an epitome of title with a good root for unregistered) and prepares the draft contract, usually incorporating the Standard Conditions of Sale, along with the property information and fittings forms.
3. Investigation of title and searches. The buyer's solicitor's core job. Raise pre-contract enquiries. Commission searches.
4. Report to client and mortgage arrangements. Report on title, deal with any lender's requirements, ensure the deposit is available.
5. Exchange of contracts. The moment risk and legal commitment bite. Insurance obligations, the deposit, the contract becoming binding.
6. Between exchange and completion. Draft the transfer (usually a TR1), engross it, carry out pre-completion searches, submit the certificate of title to the lender, request mortgage funds, prepare the completion statement.
7. Completion. Money moves, keys released, the seller's solicitor discharges the existing mortgage.
8. Post-completion. SDLT (or LTT in Wales) return and payment, then application to HM Land Registry to register the transfer and any new charge.

If you can recite that spine cold, you have already solved a category of question that simply asks "what is the next step?" or "which of these should have happened before X?"

Searches: know what each one is for

Candidates memorise a list of searches without memorising what each search protects the client against. The examiner tests the second thing.

• Local search (local land charges and CON29 enquiries) — planning history, building regulations, adopted highways, tree preservation orders. Catches the "the extension has no building regs" fact pattern.
• Drainage and water enquiry — is the property connected to mains water and public sewers, and does a public sewer run under the land.
• Environmental search — contaminated land risk, flood risk indicators.
• Chancel repair — worth knowing exists, worth knowing indemnity insurance is the usual answer.
• Coal mining / other area-specific searches — triggered by location. If the fact pattern tells you the property is in a former mining area, that detail is not decoration.
• Survey — not a search, but the same instinct. Caveat emptor still governs the physical condition of the property, and the buyer's solicitor must say so.

Then the pre-completion searches, which are a separate family and frequently confused with the pre-contract ones: OS1 (official search with priority against the whole of a registered title, in the buyer's or lender's name), OS2 where you are buying part, a bankruptcy search (K16) against the borrower where a lender is involved, and a company search if the seller is a company.

The OS1 priority period is the classic examinable point. It gives you a window during which you can apply to register free of intervening entries. Miss the window and your buyer's priority is gone — and a fact pattern where the solicitor completes but then sits on the registration application for weeks is the examiner waving at you.

Exchange and completion: the two moments that carry the risk

Everything before exchange is investigation. Everything after is administration. Exchange itself is where the legal consequences cluster, and it is disproportionately examined.

On exchange under the Standard Conditions of Sale, the contract becomes binding, the deposit becomes payable (conventionally 10%, though the contract can vary it), and — critically — the risk in the property passes to the buyer. The seller is under no obligation to insure after exchange. That is why the buyer's solicitor must have insurance in place from exchange, not from completion. A question that tells you the property burnt down three days after exchange and asks who bears the loss is testing exactly that.

Exchange is usually effected by telephone using the Law Society formulae. You should be able to distinguish them in outline: one where each solicitor holds their own client's signed part, one where the seller's solicitor holds both parts, and the personalised formula used in chains. You do not need to recite them verbatim. You do need to know which applies when.

The single most valuable habit in Property Practice revision is asking, of every fact, "so what does the solicitor do about that?" Facts in this subject are almost never neutral scenery.

Completion under the Standard Conditions happens by 2pm; late completion triggers compensation calculated at the contract rate. If completion does not happen at all, the innocent party serves a notice to complete, making time of the essence, and the other side then has a fixed period to complete. Remedies follow: the seller may forfeit the deposit and resell; the buyer may recover the deposit and, potentially, claim damages. That sequence — breach, notice to complete, remedies — is a reliable question generator.

A worked example

The facts. A solicitor acts for a buyer purchasing a registered freehold house for £480,000. Exchange takes place on 4 March, with completion set for 25 March. The buyer is a first-time buyer using a mortgage from a high street lender. The seller's title reveals a restriction requiring that no disposition by a sole proprietor is to be registered unless a second trustee is appointed. The seller is the surviving joint tenant of a former couple; the co-owner died last year.

What the examiner is probing. Several things at once. First, whether you spot that the restriction indicates a tenancy in common in equity — the deceased's beneficial share did not pass by survivorship. Second, whether you know the answer is either a second trustee joining in the transfer (so the buyer overreaches the beneficial interests) or, if the surviving proprietor is in fact the sole beneficial owner, evidence sufficient to remove the restriction. Third, whether you appreciate that this must be resolved before exchange, not raised as an afterthought between exchange and completion.

Where candidates go wrong. They reach for the death certificate as if it were a joint tenancy, because "surviving joint proprietor" reads like survivorship. Legal title did pass by survivorship — the restriction is telling you the equitable position is different. That single distinction is worth more marks across FLK2 than almost any other, because it recurs in Land Law and Trusts too.

SDLT: the bits that are actually testable

Now for the part everyone dreads unnecessarily. Stamp Duty Land Tax applies to land transactions in England and Northern Ireland. In Wales, the equivalent is Land Transaction Tax, administered by the Welsh Revenue Authority. If a question mentions a property in Cardiff or Swansea and offers you an SDLT answer, that is a deliberate distractor.

Rates and thresholds change — sometimes at short notice in a Budget — and I would strongly advise against memorising precise bands from any secondary source, including this one. What is stable, and therefore what the assessment can fairly test, is the structure:

• It is a slice, not a slab, tax. Each portion of the price is taxed at the rate applicable to that band, in the same way as income tax. Candidates who apply a single rate to the whole consideration get a wrong number and a wrong answer.
• Chargeable consideration includes money and money's worth, and can include the assumption of debt. Where a property is transferred subject to an existing mortgage, the debt assumed is consideration — a very examinable point in the "transfer between family members" fact pattern.
• Residential and non-residential rates differ, and mixed-use property attracts the non-residential scale. Six flats above a shop is not a simple residential purchase.
• Higher rates apply to additional dwellings and to purchases by companies. The buy-to-let landlord and the corporate purchaser both sit outside the standard scale.
• First-time buyer relief exists, is subject to a price cap, and requires that every purchaser is a first-time buyer. One partner who has previously owned a home anywhere in the world kills the relief for both.
• Leases are taxed differently. Any premium is taxed broadly like a purchase price, and the rent is taxed separately by reference to its net present value. You should know the two limbs exist even if you never calculate an NPV by hand.
• Compliance is the solicitor's job. An SDLT return must be filed and the tax paid within the statutory deadline running from the effective date of the transaction — normally completion. Land Registry will not register the transfer without evidence the return has been dealt with, which is why SDLT sits before registration in the post-completion sequence.

For current rates, bands and thresholds, use HMRC's published guidance rather than any revision note — including one written this month. And for what the assessment specification actually requires of you, sqe.sra.org.uk is the only authoritative source.

The SDLT question you will probably see

A buyer already owns a flat which she lets out. She is buying a house to live in for £320,000, with completion on 12 June. Her solicitor tells her the SDLT return must be filed by a certain date and that a particular rate scale applies. Which statement is correct?

You do not need the exact figures to eliminate three of the four wrong options. She owns another dwelling and is not replacing a main residence she has sold, so the higher rates for additional dwellings are in play. She is not a first-time buyer, so any option offering relief is out. The property is wholly residential, so non-residential rates are out. The clock runs from the effective date, so any option starting from exchange is out. That is the exam technique: reason to the answer through structure, not arithmetic.

How to revise this subject so it sticks

Property Practice punishes passive reading more than most subjects. Reading a chapter on searches produces a warm feeling of comprehension that evaporates within a week. What actually works:

1. Build the timeline once, from memory, on one side of A4. Eight stages, with three or four bullet points each. Redraw it weekly without looking. When you can do it in under six minutes, you own the spine.
2. Make a "whose problem is this?" table. For each stage, note what the buyer's solicitor does, what the seller's solicitor does, and what the lender wants. Three columns. It exposes gaps immediately.
3. Drill leasehold separately. Landlord and tenant covenants, alienation clauses, licence to assign, service charges, the difference between old and new tenancies for liability purposes. Leasehold is a distinct examinable block and candidates who only revise freehold sales get caught out.
4. Do questions in mixed sets, not topic sets. Topic-blocked practice inflates your accuracy because you already know the question is about searches. Mixed practice replicates the exam. This is where a proper question bank earns its keep — I used the Ant Law SQE Question Bank for exactly this, filtering to FLK2 and then deliberately not filtering further, so Property, Land Law and Trusts questions arrived in unpredictable order.
5. Keep a wrong-answer log with a "why" column. Not "I got it wrong" — "I applied slab rates instead of slice", or "I forgot risk passes on exchange". The pattern in your errors is more useful than the errors themselves.

A note on time pressure

With 180 questions across two sessions of 2 hours 33 minutes each, you have a shade under 51 seconds per question. Property fact patterns tend to be long — dates, prices, parties, title entries — and it is easy to burn 90 seconds on a single conveyancing timeline question while telling yourself you are being thorough. Practise reading the question stem last: skim the facts, read what is actually being asked, then go back for the relevant details. On this subject specifically, it can claw back several minutes over a session.

Where Property Practice fits in the bigger qualification picture

Worth keeping perspective. SQE1 is one component of solicitor qualification in England and Wales. Beyond it sit SQE2's five practical skills assessments — Client Interviewing, Advocacy, Case and Matter Analysis, Legal Research, and Legal Writing and Drafting — a qualifying degree or equivalent, two years of Qualifying Work Experience, and the SRA's character and suitability requirements. Property Practice knowledge carries directly into SQE2, incidentally: property is one of the practice areas in which those skills are assessed, and the drafting and research tasks draw on precisely the transactional vocabulary you are building now.

If you are also chasing QWE while revising, there is a quiet advantage in doing property work: the conveyancing sequence stops being an abstraction the first time you actually chase a mortgage redemption figure at half past four on a Friday. Not everyone gets that opportunity, and you can absolutely pass without it. But if you have a choice of seat, it helps.

On pass rates — people ask constantly, and the honest answer is that FLK1 and FLK2 outcomes vary by sitting and by candidate cohort, and the SRA publishes the figures after each assessment. Look them up on sqe.sra.org.uk rather than trusting a number someone quoted in a group chat eighteen months ago. The published data is more nuanced than the headline percentage suggests anyway.

Your next step this week

Do this today, before you read another chapter: write the eight-stage conveyancing timeline from memory. Then sit twenty mixed FLK2 questions covering Property Practice, Land Law and Trusts, untimed, and log every error with a reason. You will learn more about your actual readiness in ninety minutes than in a fortnight of highlighting.

If you want a structured way to run that drill — mixed sets, subject-level accuracy tracking, and full-length mocks that mirror the real timing ratio — the Ant Law SQE Question Bank is built for it, on iOS, Android and at antlaw.ai. Start with fifty Property Practice questions and see where the gaps actually are. They are rarely where you expect.