Ask anyone who works in bridging where completions go to die and you'll get the same answer: the legals. Not the underwriting, not the valuation — the fortnight that becomes six weeks between "terms agreed" and money moving. Almost all of that lost time is avoidable, and avoiding it starts with one decision made on day one. This guide walks the whole process so you can see where the weeks live.
The decision that sets your timeline: who acts for you
A bridging transaction is conveyancing at five times speed with a lender's requirements layered on top. The high-street conveyancer who did your house purchase beautifully over four months is structurally unsuited to it — not through lack of skill, but lack of pattern recognition: they haven't seen this lender's requirements before, they run searches because that's the process, they respond in days because residential timescales allow it. A solicitor who completes bridges every week knows which lenders accept indemnity insurance instead of searches, drafts undertakings in the form the other side expects, and answers the same day because they know the whole deal dies in a slow week. The fee difference is small. The timeline difference is measured in weeks, and on a bridge, weeks are money — ask what volume of bridging work the firm completes monthly before you instruct, and treat a vague answer as a no.
What the lender's solicitor is doing
Their job is making the security safe to lend against. Title investigation first: the register, the plan, restrictions, covenants, easements, anything registered against the property that survives a sale. Their output is a report or certificate on title to their client — the lender — and every defect they find becomes a requisition on your side to fix, insure or explain. Searches follow, or don't: full local authority searches can take weeks in some boroughs, which is why bridging practice leans on search indemnity insurance — a policy covering what the search would have found — wherever the lender allows. Then the redemption layer: if an existing charge sits on the property, a redemption statement from that lender is needed, and some take a fortnight to produce it; on second charges, consents or a deed of postponement from the first lender join the queue. None of these items is difficult. All of them are slow when started late.
Where the weeks actually go
The pattern across hundreds of completions: redemption statements requested in week three instead of day one. Planning documents for historic works that nobody can find, resolved eventually by indemnity policy — after eight days of looking. Unregistered land, or a register entry that doesn't match reality. ID and source-of-funds evidence trickling in item by item. A restriction on title requiring a third party's consent that nobody read the register early enough to spot. Enquiries answered in batches weekly instead of daily. And the classic: completion scheduled before anyone confirmed the insurance was in place with the lender's interest noted. Every one of these is a day-one task discovered in week three.
Undertakings and completion day itself
Two mechanics deserve plain-English explanation because they carry the whole final week. A solicitor's undertaking is a professional promise — to redeem the existing charge from completion monies, to hold funds to order, to forward documents — and it's the grease that lets money move before every last formality lands, because breaching one ends careers. Bridging runs on undertakings; conveyancers unused to giving them hesitate, and hesitation at completion is expensive. Completion day itself is choreography: lender's funds to their solicitor, through to yours, redemption figures paid against undertakings, balances accounted to you, charges registered afterwards. When it's smooth it takes a morning — and it's smooth precisely in proportion to how much of this guide happened in week one.
Running it properly
Instruct your solicitor when you apply, not when terms are issued. Get the lender's conditions-precedent list into their hands the day it exists, agree who owns each line, and hold a ten-minute call twice a week until it's cleared. Dual representation — one firm acting for both lender and borrower, where offered — removes the ping-pong entirely and is often the single biggest accelerator available; the trade-off is that on a genuine conflict the firm must step back, so it suits clean deals best and the firm will screen for that upfront. And do your own homework: dig out planning consents, building regs sign-offs, lease documents and ID before anyone asks. The borrower who arrives with the file assembled completes in a fortnight. The one who assembles it on request completes in six weeks, at the same rate, with the same lender.
One habit separates the professionals: they treat the CP list as their own to-do list, not their solicitor's. Every line has a name and a date by day two. Deals run at the speed of their slowest unowned item — so leave nothing unowned.