The Connells figures that landed this week don’t surprise me. We can all feel it. Transactions are slower. Fall-throughs are creeping up. Leasehold is a nightmare. But nothing changes. Agents continue to leave transactions to solicitors and act surprised when it takes their vendor two weeks to complete protocol forms.

I think we’ve quietly accepted something we shouldn’t be accepting.

I run a sales progression company. Our average transaction completes in 78 days – nearly a month faster than the national average Connells just reported. Our fall-through rate is 17%, less than half the 37% reported for 2025. I’m telling you that not to brag, but because it matters: those national figures aren’t inevitable. They’re a consequence of the industry not being proactive enough to protect its own pipelines.

So, how do we manage to reduce fall-through rates by more than 50%?

Sales progression isn’t admin anymore. It’s emotion management.

The old version of this job was paperwork, box ticking and chasing. Get the memo of sale out, pester the solicitor, manage the chain. That isn’t the job now. Not even close.

Today, if a buyer hasn’t heard from anyone for two weeks, they’re already halfway out of the door, scrolling Rightmove. They’re showing their survey to a cousin who bought a house four years ago. They’re sending the search results to ChatGPT and asking whether they should withdraw because the property is on clay soil – and AI, bless it, will happily tell them what it thinks they want to hear, with all the confidence in the world. Which is often very confidently wrong.

You can’t hold a sale together with chaser emails. You hold it together by actually knowing the people on both sides, spotting a buyer who’s wobbling before they know they’re wobbling, and stepping in with calm, experienced advice from a real human being who’s been here a thousand times before. It’s invisible work when it goes right. It’s catastrophic when no one’s doing it.

So what do we actually do?

Two things. Neither of them clever, neither of them new, both of them rarely happening.

One: progressors need a sensible caseload. We cap ours at 60 cases per progressor. I’ve had progressors join us from roles where they were juggling 150, sometimes 200 cases at once. You cannot do this job well at that volume. You can barely do it badly. If you’re an agency director and your team is drowning, your fall-through rate is telling you something. Listen to it. And if you can’t resource it properly in-house, outsource it to someone who can – that’s what we exist for.

Two: start getting your vendors legally prepared before you list them.

Agents love to rush to list properties for sale, but we should be taking the time to educate our vendors and get them legally prepared before going live.

What does that look like?

Instructing their solicitor (a good one, who isn’t already buried under 200 files), ID checks done, TA forms completed, warranties, certificated and planning permissions located. If it’s leasehold: locate the lease, the recent service charge and ground rent statements, and ask the managing agent up front how long their management pack takes to come back. If the building is over 11 metres: obtain the EWS1 or FRAEW now, not in week two of a transaction.

Doing this work before a buyer is even involved takes weeks off the transaction. It means your draft contracts can go out within 24 hours of memos being issued. More importantly, it pulls the problems forward. The issues that would have blown the deal up at week eight surface at week minus four instead. Because by week eight, the buyer is already feeling impatient and less likely to compromise.

Almost no agent is doing this. Which is mad, frankly, because it would set them apart from every competitor on their high street overnight.

The conveyancing problem is real, but it isn’t an excuse.

We’re genuinely short of conveyancers and the caseload-per-conveyancer numbers are climbing. That’s a real problem and the industry has to deal with it. But it isn’t the whole story. Most of the time I see saved on a transaction isn’t saved at the legal stage. It’s saved in the front half of the deal, where the vendor is prepared, the progressor isn’t drowning, and the buyers and sellers are being properly looked after and guided.

Connells is right that 104 days matters. But the answer isn’t to shrug and say it’s all got too complicated. The answer is to stop pretending that someone, somewhere, is going to fix this for us. Sales progression is now a serious, skilled, emotional job, and the people doing it need to be set up properly. That’s where the time gets saved. That’s where the fall-throughs stop.

The figures aren’t fate. They’re a mirror.

Natasha Candeias is the founder and director of Property Progressors. 

Leasehold bottlenecks leave buyers and sellers waiting longer to complete