Those who remember my long involvement in the battle over Home Information Packs will be unsurprised that the news of an MHCLG (Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government ) consultation on improving the home buying process caused me to raise a sceptical eyebrow.
Sure enough, the consultation document is, broadly speaking, reminiscent of “Key research on easier home buying and selling” housing research report, published by the DETR ((Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions – the forerunner of MHCLG) in December 1998.
Way back then they were talking about how a third of transactions fell though, how the legal process took too long, how buyers needed more upfront information, how people lost money when sales fell through etc etc. If you had added in the word ‘digitalisation’ (which was almost unheard of in those days) you could have foretold what a lot of the consultation document of 2025 would look like.
Another striking parallel is that the 1998 document backed up its claims about the awfulness of the home buying process by the selective use of statistics that mostly didn’t stand up to scrutiny. I am not for a moment casting doubt upon the figures provided to MHCLG by Landmark Information Group – who are one of only three sources quoted – but since the current consultation carries no detailed research data it is not possible to analyse the claimed figures and we are expected to take the stats at face value.
This is especially true of the headline-grabbing assertion that failed transactions cost buyers and sellers around £400m per year. The footnote to this particular figure says it is derived from ‘TPX Impact research for MHCLG, unpublished’. Apparently TPX Impact is ‘…a digital transformation company supporting organisations to build a better future for people, places and the planet.’
When a government department, pushing an agenda on behalf of its political masters, uses unpublished ‘research’ to make a sweeping claim that conveniently underpins their case for change, I think eyebrow-raising is forgivable.
And let’s not dwell too long on the more spurious window dressing that MHCLG has liberally sprinkled through the consultation document. The red herring of the wonderfulness of the Scottish system of property transfer is of course there; Norway, Australia, Finland, Estonia, and star of the 1998 ‘research’, Denmark, all get honourable mentions. Trailing ‘binding conditional contracts’ sounds marvellous but we all know how vanishingly rarely they are practicable. Oh, and they want to ‘professionalise’ estate agents because ‘too many are failing consumers’. I call B.S.
It’s fine to have a far-reaching ambition to improve the home buying process but it is not possible to create beneficial change at a stroke and I fully expect MHCLG to fall into exactly the same hole that the its forerunner fell into with Home Information Packs. They’ll try to change everything and end up changing nothing.
MHCLG has five objectives:
Faster, more reliable transactions
Reduced fall throughs and risks
High professional standards
Better informed consumers
Trust and confidence in the system
All very laudable, though only the first two have real relevance, but there are several elephants in the room…
So long as most home buyers have to sell an existing property before proceeding with the purchase, we shall have chain transactions. We all know that chains move at the speed of the slowest and we all know that chains break. Unless MHCLG can come up with a way to abolish death, divorce, debt, job loss, pregnancy, and people simply changing their minds, the chain – or indeed any sale that is subject to contract – will be at risk. I must admit that I have no idea how we could do away with chains.
So long as mortgage lenders require conveyancers to dance through multiple hoops, dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’, and unwilling and unable to risk a professional negligence claim, never take a pragmatic view on anything, the legal process will take a grindingly long time. Add in the dominance of the mass-conveyancing outfits who pile it high and sell it cheap – and as a consequence give staff case-loads that inevitably cause delay – plus the apparent inability of many conveyancers to communicate by 21st century means, and it is certain that transaction times will remain painfully extended.
So long as local authority and Land Registry searches take weeks and weeks (always assuming the Land Registry isn’t swamped with its usual backlog) there will be delays.
So long as Managing Agents can take as long as they like and charge what they like to provide service charge information there will be delays.
Having searches and charges info ‘up front’ in some sort of pack may help but will not of itself resolve the issue. And sellers will not tolerate the delays being front-loaded if they have to provide a HIP type package at the time when a property goes on the market.
Where the consultation is spot on is in stating that, ‘Technology must underpin this change.’
In technology terms we are light years from the time when HIPs arrived and there are dozens, if not hundreds of initiatives under way to enhance and improve data communication in the home buying process. If the multiplicity of commercial companies and state entities such as local authorities can develop a cohesive whole then we will see improvements that benefit everyone involved in buying or selling a home.
The so-called digitalisation of the processes will bring immense changes. Where MHCLG may have a struggle is in getting the disparate industries and professions to fully embrace those changes. Blunt imposition will not achieve success.
If these issues are not dealt with before we get saddled with HIPs Mark 2 there will be major problems and very little benefit to anyone (except perhaps for the commercial entities that exploit the changes – remember the Home Condition Report inspectors debacle?).
Let us hope that the current consultation is a genuine attempt to listen to knowledgeable people engaged daily at the coal-face of the process and not a rehash of 1998 when the policy had already been set in tablets of stone before any real consultation took place. I won’t hold my breath.
Doing nothing is not a desirable option and the impact of technology will be profound. But if current Housing Minister Steve Reed thinks there is a magic wand in the form of digitalisation to solve the ills of the home buying process at a stroke, he’s in for a big disappointment.
The elephants will trample his ambitions.
David Jabbari, CEO of Muve. Well done Nick for the best and most insightful comment I have seen on this consultation.
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A very well written, well thought-through article, Nick.
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It’s people like this that hold our country back. If countries abroad can have a better system, even Scotland, why can’t the UK? Technology has improved and it really doesn’t matter if searches take the same time people just need to plan ahead. This article is excuse after excuse. Yes it’s a complicated subject. Yes the legal system when it’s comes to buying and selling houses is broken and inefficient but the system need to change. We all work on the behalf of customers. It’s time they got a decent level of service. Currently they don’t. And don’t get me started on High St agents as per July’s Panorama programme and the follow up Radio 4 Hear and Now programme.
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@Simo
Can you let us know what your background is?
Just for transparency, I’ve owned an estate agency for around 18 years and have been an agent for 25 years.
It would be good to know why your point of view carries weight in terms of experience or perhaps you’re regularly involved in transactions in the house buying process? This isn’t a dig, but in order to counter or debate Nick’s article I would hope there’s some experience there to back what you’re saying.
I agree with you that technology has come a long way, but trust me, one thing remains constant in property transactions and that’s people – properties are homes, a persons largest asset and the place that makes them feel secure – not everything can be solved by tech.
I think the main point here is that you have to change a complete house buying system, not just a few things that remind us and are very very similar to what was promised by gen HIPS was introduced.
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Certainly Mark. Before founding Property Industry Eye in 2014 I had a long career in estate agency at local, regional and national level. I was a director of a Central London agency and MD of Harrison Murray, which had branches all over the East Midlands. I was a council member of the National Association of Estate Agents and then a director of the newly-created Propertymark organisation. In the early 2000s I founded (with Penny Court of Beauchamp Estates in London) the SPLINTA campaign (Sellers Pack Law Is Not The Answer) to lobby for beneficial changes to the proposals to improve the home buying process. We engaged and debated with stakeholders, civil servants, and Ministers. The campaign was backed by over 2000 estate agency businesses and gained national recognition.
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Hi Nick,
I know who you are, I was replying to @simo
Lol
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Oops. Sorry Mark. Must put the specs on!
I’ll leave the reply up as there will be a lot of readers who won’t have been around when the HIPs battle was under way.
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this little interaction is brilliant! : )
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Whilst I applaud the initiative, there are certainly potential issues with some of the plans.
Take, for example, the owner of a house on an estate who is asked to pay £400 up front to the managing agents for a FME pack before even going on the market, let alone receiving an acceptable offer. If searches are also required up front, add another £300.
If the property is subject to an estate rentcharge, will the seller need to obtain a Deed of Variation before marketing or wait until after a sale is agreed? Add another £(rentcharge owner name your price plus fees).
And so on….
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“Doing nothing is not a desirable option.”
If even part of the consultation objectives succeed, it will be a step in the right direction. 15 years wasted, don’t let history repeat itself again by joining those who stop at obstacles and don’t try to get over, under, or around them.
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As always, I chip in with – take a look at the Aussie route – guaranteed 4 – 6 weeks from agreed offer to getting the keys. What’s not to like?
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Australia has lots of land and ‘spare’ accommodation so people don’t have chains. We have chains and people unwilling to move their stuff into ‘temporary’. And it’s not all sparkles and roses there either – people still complain about their agents in the land of Oz. They also rarely have leasehold but still have the same issue as we do with dodgy developers.
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Nick — fair points, but calling this HIPs Mark 2 gives a puppy a bad name before it’s even born.
We’re a generation on from HIPs.
Technology, thinking, and people have all moved on — and the results are proven.
Between 2020 and 2022, Contract Ready showed what happens when you do it properly:
• Over 1,400 completions and 1,500 sales agreed
• A minimum 3-week saving, with an average of eight
• One trial office’s market share up from 19 % to 37 %
All evidenced. All receipted.
The old HIPs concerns are legacy concerns.
Gathering verified information is no longer a bureaucratic exercise — it’s structured, reusable, and frictionless.
Everything this consultation now proposes was already demonstrated — and accepted — by DLUHC in 2023, with funding allocated before politics intervened.
So the challenge isn’t discovery anymore.
It’s acceptance and implementation, not resentment and anger.
And if anyone’s still wondering whether this benefits agents —
I can think of 291 million reasons why it does.
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In complete agreement Nick. How or why anyone with an ounce of brainpower thinks that government intervention ever solves anything in any industry, when it has never happened even once, in any industry, to my knowledge, is a mystery.
Waking up to see some in the industry cheering for government involvement felt like a bizarre bad dream.
When the incentives to fix things exist, they will improve, not before.
This is what I’m trying to show with the Carringtons “No Valuations” project: So far, all houses have gone under offer in 28 days or less, and time to exchange is down to 7 weeks average. That’s more than halved the time, on everything. Everyone’s happy, buyer, seller, and the agent now getting 2% with no argument based on these results.
And there are chains in there too.
All of which is to say that, for agents who choose to stick to the common sense, old fashioned basics, deals will still happen at speed, with or without tech.
Adding in the right tech will allow it to happen more consistently across a wider range of businesses.
But as long as people keep on taking monstrous referral commissions from call-centre conveyancers, the incentives are all messed up and this problem will continue.
Prioritise successful, swift transactions above all else, and everything falls into place.
Try to game the system for an extra buck on the side, it all falls apart.
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“How or why anyone with an ounce of brainpower thinks that government intervention ever solves anything in any industry, when it has never happened even once, in any industry, to my knowledge, is a mystery.”
It has been said that the most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” (Credit: R Reagan)
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Insightful as usual Nick – I remember sitting on TV and radio progs with you back in the day, so although hope springs eternal that the Gov’ts propensity for **** up doesn’t reappear.
The one thing no one has mentioned here is that the Gov’t is one of the few outfits able to afford to educate the public as to what’s now possible. We all know many agents/conveyancers/mortgagors won’t change until CONSUMERS demand it. If MHCLG started running a series of ads and pointed consumers at a website with a sensibly curated set of vetted suppliers able to compete in various areas [searches, conveyancing etc.,] and competing on price, rather than a rushed and bungled single supplier set up. Via education on the site they’d be able to approach their mortgagor, conveyancer or agent with their own ideas and demand change. If this centralised services website was set up right then it could became a default place to visit for anyone about to enter the ‘arena’? Just an idea, but getting dozens of suppliers jumping up and down shouting for attention isn’t the way to get the industry or public’s attention – and it’s ONLY by getting their attention that things will change. The industry itself has shown it’s woefully incapable of doing it, as your insightful article points out.
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The problem with the reform isn’t the industry. It’s the government. They have an agenda and they have the power.
The problem is the have not an iota of a clue about the “real world”.
There is huge potential for them to throw a huge hand grenade into the industry and screw things up bg time and fora long time.
A 3 month consultation to fix a 100 year old issue isn’t long enough and they are the wrong people to do it.
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