Property Practice SQE1 questions

What Property Practice covers in SQE1

The SRA's assessment specification for assessments from 1 September 2026 calls the subject Property Law and Practice. Its assessment objectives follow a freehold or leasehold transaction, residential or commercial, from start to finish:

• Title and searches: registered and unregistered title, pre-contract searches and enquiries, and the Law Society Conveyancing Protocol.
• Finance and the lender: sources of finance, types of mortgage, the lender's requirements and the certificate of title.
• Contract and exchange: drafting the contract, the Standard Conditions of Sale and Standard Commercial Property Conditions, the deposit, insurance and risk, and the Law Society's formulae for exchange.
• Completion: the transfer deed, pre-completion searches, apportionments, completion and post-completion steps in England and in Wales, and remedies for delayed completion.
• Commercial leases: lease terms, grant and assignment, licences, authorised guarantee agreements, covenant liability, remedies, termination, and security of tenure under Part II of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954.
• Planning: development, matters that need no express permission, building regulations and enforcement.
• Tax: Stamp Duty Land Tax in England, Land Transaction Tax in Wales, VAT on land and buildings, and Capital Gains Tax with Private Residence Relief.

The 2026 review added no new areas but now names drafting the contract for the assignment of a lease, apportionments and contracting out of the 1954 Act.

Where it sits in FLK2

From January 2027 FLK2 session 2 covers Property Practice, Solicitors Accounts in the context of property, and the two criminal areas, Criminal Liability and Criminal Law and Practice. The questions are mixed in a random order, so a question on exchange can follow one on bail. Ethics can arise anywhere, and conveyancing is a common setting: a conflict between buyer and lender, or a client who asks you to keep something from the lender.

The SRA's 2019 blueprint, the only version published in full, puts Property Practice at 14 to 20 percent of FLK2. In its annual report for 2023/24 the mean scaled score in Property Practice was 278, the second lowest in FLK2.

Questions follow the law as at 11 September 2026, the cut-off for the January 2027 sitting. SDLT and LTT rates and bands are given in the question. What is tested is which rates apply, such as first-time buyers' relief or the higher rates, and how each slice is taxed. The SQE1 tax calculator works SDLT in that form.

Where candidates go wrong

• Mixing up search priority periods. An official search of a registered title gives 30 working days' priority. A land charges search in unregistered land protects for 15 working days. Candidates borrow one period for the other, or count calendar days.
• Treating tax deadlines as the same. The SDLT return is due within 14 days of the effective date and the LTT return within 30 days. The effective date is usually completion, but substantial performance, such as taking possession, can bring it forward.
• Reading the 1954 Act as ending the lease. A protected business tenancy continues after its contractual term until it is ended in a way the Act allows. Contracting out needs a warning notice and a declaration by the tenant, a statutory declaration if the notice is given less than 14 days before the tenant is bound, and a reference in the lease itself.
• Assuming a landlord's consent. A landlord's silence on an application for consent to assign does not allow the tenant to go ahead. Whether consent can be refused depends first on whether the covenant is absolute or qualified.
• Applying the wrong covenant regime. Under a lease granted on or after 1 January 1996 the original tenant is released on a lawful assignment, subject to any authorised guarantee agreement. Under an older lease the original tenant stays liable for the whole term.

How to revise Property Practice

Learn the transaction as a sequence and attach each rule to its step: instructions and identity checks, title, searches, finance, the contract, exchange, pre-completion searches, completion, then SDLT or LTT and registration. Many questions describe a stage and ask for the next step.

Revise Land Law alongside it, because overriding interests, notices and covenants decide what a title investigation turns up; the Land Law questions test that side. Deposits and completion monies return in Solicitors Accounts in the same session, and the Solicitors Accounts trainer posts those entries.

Work SDLT by hand until the slice method is automatic. The SQE1 study plan gives Property Practice its share of the weeks before your sitting.