People hear "personal search company" and assume it's straightforward. You get the data from the council. You send it to the solicitor. Job done.
It is not straightforward. And if you're running one, you already know that.
What the job actually is
A personal search company compiles the property searches a conveyancer needs before a sale can complete — the local authority search (CON29 and LLC1), drainage and water, environmental and more. It's the firm that produces the searches: not a buying agent who finds houses, and nothing to do with the AI "search agents" the term now gets confused with.
When a solicitor needs to know what the local authority holds on a property — planning history, road adoptions, drainage, land charges — they order a local authority search. They can wait for the council to do it themselves (an official search), or they can instruct a personal search company to get there faster.
Your job is to get the same information the council would have produced, return it in the right format, and do it quickly enough that the transaction keeps moving. For most searches in England and Wales, that means a CON29 and an LLC1 — the two documents that tell the solicitor and their client what they need to know before exchanging contracts.
That's the description that goes on the website. Here's what it actually involves.
What happens on every single search
An order lands. Before anything goes out the door, the address needs to be verified and matched to a UPRN — the unique reference number that anchors everything. Most addresses match automatically. The ones that don't need manual checking, and they need it before the clock starts, not after.
Then the council. Not just which council — there are over 300 local authorities in England and Wales, and each one has its own way of working. The right email address. Whether they need the admin ward included (Rossendale does; most don't). Whether they require a prior appointment before they'll accept a request. What format they expect. What they'll reject without telling you why for three days.
Then the providers. Drainage and environmental searches go to Landmark or Martello. These are separate portals, separate logins, separate processes — with data you already have from the original order.
Then the wait. You track what's in flight, chase what's running late, manage the solicitor's expectations about what's delayed and why.
Then the report. When responses come back, the CON29 gets built and checked. Then the invoice.
That's one search. Now run it across thirty, fifty, a hundred orders a week — some at different stages, some waiting on different councils, some with complications — and you start to understand why the back office is where search firms either build something solid or quietly start to crack.
Why the solicitor-facing platforms don't help
If you've looked at InfoTrack, SearchFlow, Elan, or TM Group hoping they might solve some of this, you'll have noticed they don't.
Those platforms are for solicitors. They help solicitors place orders, track results, and manage their conveyancing files. They're good at that. But the moment a search order leaves a solicitor's system and arrives with your team, those platforms are done. What happens next is your problem.
That's not a criticism of those tools — they're built for a different customer. But it does mean that if you're running a search company, you're on your own for the actual work.
Where most firms end up
Most personal search operations are held together by a small number of experienced people who know the councils, know the quirks, and know which orders to watch. The spreadsheet works because they built it. The shared inbox works because they check it constantly. The invoices go out because they remember to do them.
It works — until someone leaves. Until volume jumps faster than the team can absorb. Until a council changes a process and the knowledge that used to be accurate isn't anymore, and nobody notices until something goes wrong.
"I've worked with firms that were brilliant at the actual search work — real expertise, real relationships with councils — but were running the business side on pure memory and hope. That's not sustainable. At some point the memory fails or the person walks out the door, and you realise how much of what looked like a process was actually just one person doing a lot of invisible holding together."
— Valerie Bennett, Personal Search Veteran · June 2026
What a well-run search operation looks like
The firms that handle volume well — that can take on more work without adding headcount at the same rate — have one thing in common. The process doesn't live in people's heads. It lives in the system.
Every council requirement is documented and current, available to anyone on the team. Every order has a visible status. Every overdue response is flagged before the solicitor has to ask. Every completed search generates an invoice without someone having to remember.
The experienced staff are still there — and their expertise matters, especially for the searches that need judgement. But the repetitive parts, the same-every-time parts, happen the same way every time without anyone having to carry them.
That's what Valio is built to do. It runs the back office of a personal search company — with every council in England and Wales already configured, so you're not starting from scratch.
How Valio works → · The order-to-invoice workflow → · Val's story →