The need for speed in home buying 

With the digitalisation of nearly all aspects of our daily lives, consumers have become accustomed to fast processes and near instant services. Expectations are no different for the property transaction process. However, whether buying or selling a home, the process can feel painfully slow, with delays at every turn. 

The pressure to speed up the process comes from the government too. Time is already ticking on the Chancellor’s ambitious plans to build 1.5 million new homes by 2029. It is an admirable promise and speaks to the Government’s commitment to increasing homeownership. Yet, questions remain as to whether the current conveyancing infrastructure would be able to cope with the associated surge in market activity – given the existing strain on the sector – and its impact on the consumer experience.    

The next blog in our series following the publication of our Home Movers Trends Report covers what a third of homebuyers said was the most stressful part of the transaction – the time taken to buy a property.

While progress has been made in the last three years, with our research showing that completion times reduced by 9% between 2022 and 2024, there is still a way to go. The same research found that, unfortunately, the time taken to get from putting an offer in on a property to completing is still nearly five months, despite most consumers thinking it should be under three. But this is an average - the reality for some buyers is much worse. One in nine transactions take more than six months, with only one in five meeting consumers’ expectations of completing in under three months. This is not the fault of conveyancers who work hard to make transactions happen, but these drawn-out timelines continue to leave everyone feeling uncertain and anxious. The lack of clarity around these delays only adds to the stress.

These delays have a palpable impact on consumers. With long delays, for instance, house buyers fear that their mortgage deals will expire before the date of completion. Our research showed that more than one in five (21%) of survey respondents said that the chance that their rate might change during the process was indeed one of their biggest stresses.

These delays also impact those who service the mortgage market, including conveyancers. The length of the process, and its complexity, is impacting the industry’s capacity, which exposes conveyancers to disproportionate stress and working conditions, especially in times of high demand, such as the recent Stamp Duty stampede. 

For the sake of client relationships, conveyancers’ wellbeing and, perhaps most importantly, the socioeconomic need to rapidly build and sell the number of homes the Government has legislated for, it is critical to speed up the property transaction process.  

There is no silver bullet solution, but bringing in the right technology and getting the balance right between this and maintaining the human touch is key. There are several key initiatives, trade associations and third-party providers working with the industry to ensure that digitisation for the sake of efficiency and certainty for all, remains a top priority. The technology exists to enable the automation of responses to simple case enquiries, send automatic updates to clients at each stage of the process and even trigger lender to lender updates as different forms are completed and the transaction moves along the journey, all of which could help address perceived issues for consumers like unforeseen delays and complicated paperwork. 

Technology could, for example, identify missing information or potential title issues at the very start of the process or support consumers in completing information more efficiently as well as sharing data securely and effectively between parties. 

Consumer experience in other walks of life is being transformed – switching bank accounts or insurance providers is much easier than it was a few years ago with new platforms being put to use, and they expect the same of all their financial services.  There is much more we can do collectively to make sure that people’s biggest financial decision is as seamless as their smallest, while supporting conveyancers to focus on delivering their expertise which buyers desperately need. 

You can download The Home Movers Trend report via the following link: The Home Movers Trends Report. 

Read our last blog on the unexpected costs facing UK homebuyers here.