Market insight from Material Information and digital property pack provider, Moverly, suggests that the UK has the slowest home moving timeline among 12 global nations.
Moverly has analysed the average time it takes to sell a home in 12 countries, countries that UK citizens often choose to emigrate to.
The analysis shows that across the 12 nations, it takes an average 110 days for a property to go from its initial listing all the way through to completion.
According t0 the study, the fastest homeselling nation is, by far, the USA where it takes an average of just 53 days to go from listing to ‘closing’.
At the bottom of the table with easily the slowest selling process is the UK. It takes an average of 179 days – almost six months – to go from listing to completion. This is 70% longer than the USA, equivalent to a difference of 126 days.
Other nations to have fast selling processes include UAE (70 days), New Zealand (72 days), Canada (90 days), and Australia (95 days).
The nations where homeselling comes close to taking as long as it does in the UK are Italy (159 days), Spain (152 days), Portugal (152 days), andSingapore (152 days), while Germany (137 days), and France (105 days) sit middle of the table.
So why is the UK’s selling process so slow when other nation’s prove that it’s clearly possible for the transaction to be completed at a much faster rate?
Gemma Young, CEO of Moverly, suggests that the issues with the UK process are result of its unique idiosyncrasies causing bumps and obstacles that sellers and property professionals have to navigate throughout the selling journey, many of which other countries have managed to iron out over the years.
These include everything from archaic conveyancing practices to elongated windows in which buyers and sellers are legally allowed to change their minds and pull out of transactions.
Gemma Young, Moverly CEO, said: “It seems you have to move halfway around the world to access a decent home selling process. The Americans are showing the rest of the world up while the UK is making everyone else look very good! That’s not to say the US model is better, but it’s certainly much faster and we should be doing everything we can to speed up what has become a painfully sluggish journey here in the UK.
“Conveyancing is a definite culprit when it comes to delaying the selling process, and this is because too many of the legal processes that pave the way to exchange of contracts have remained unchanged for decades, if not longer. By simply streamlining and digitising many of the conveyancing processes, we have proven that the time to sell can be reduced from up to 70%, which means the UK is perfectly capable of matching the speed of the US market. As more and more agents and conveyancers adopt the tech solutions that are now widely available to them, we expect the UK’s performance to see radical improvement in a short period of time.”
A non-conveyancer commenting on ways that conveyancers can be helped. Always makes sense.
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Conveyencer?
That is part of the problem conveyencers are usually clerks not real solicitors
If they all learnt to pick up a phone rather than send an e mail or letter and not work from home and not ook after kds when meant to be working the process would be much faster
But they get paid if a deal does not go through so they do not care
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Why do most conveyancers start collating contract pack info after you agree the sale?
Why doesn’t the pack always be full enough to answer 99% of enquiries?
Surely conveyancers should spell out the positives to instruct and prep before launching to market?
Most conveyancers being reactive makes the UK bottom of the world table on speed of moving.
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“Why do most conveyancers start collating contract pack info after you agree the sale?” Because they aren’t instructed prior to an offer being accepted Shaun.
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Even if they are instructed most in my experience don’t.
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People don’t want to pay for work being done before a buyer is found. Even if instructed, sellers will ask us to ‘sit on it’ until a buyer is found and secondly, if the paperwork is dated, buyers will see the date and potentially ask for the same to be re-done or done in line with the date of any sale.
You are basically relying on solicitors/conveyancers competence and there is a huge discrepancy between who is competent and who is not, with factory firms employing inexperienced and unqualified people to man the front lines for cheap fees. Agents’ insistence on continuing to make additional money from use of referral fees then bottle necks where the work goes and the greed of some of these firms means the taps won’t be turned off.
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1. Serious sellers who want to get on with it want work to be done in advance.
2. Collating FENSA and all the rest wont date.
3. Some factory firms are better than non factory sols.
4. Referral fees are used in all industries no one forces any business to pay them.
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Many other countries do not operate a chain system for buying & selling. You have to sell and then buy in disconnected transactions.
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Crikey….
INCOMING!!!
Gemma, your post is bound to attract some flak, and understandably so. The perspective you’ve shared certainly stirs the pot, but it’s important to remember that the conveyancing profession is facing significant changes and challenges that will be difficult to navigate.
The expansion of “factory farm” conveyancing and the inevitable fee erosion from firms undercutting prices are creating a climate of uncertainty for well-qualified, experienced professionals. These individuals, who have dedicated their careers to providing meticulous and personalised service, now face the difficult reality of adapting to a rapidly evolving market.
The shift we’re witnessing is not just due to new demands but also an inevitable result of legislative changes and broader market forces. Your post, while highlighting the need for speed and efficiency, may be seen as inflammatory by those who are already feeling vulnerable in the face of these changes. It’s a tough position to be in—caught between the push for modernisation and the challenges posed by new business models.
What’s needed now is not just a call for faster processes, but a collaborative effort to help these professionals manage the transition from the traditional conveyancing model to what it could become. Instead of further polarising the conversation, it would be more productive to focus on how we can support the conveyancers who are in the middle of this storm, helping them adapt to new realities while maintaining the high standards of service their clients demand.
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Is it just me or are we back in the silly season of conveyancer bashing again? Almost daily there seems to be an article quoting a non-conveyancer who thinks they know better than us how to deal with complex transactions? If I did not know better I would almost assume someone somewhere has stirred up the law tech brigade and roused them into action to tell us all how their great systems can change conveyancing overnight.
I note this lady quotes herself as a Material Information provider, so of course what this article really is saying is that MI is the future. Which as we all know it isn’t. Whilst all the countries she quotes have different systems to ours. It is a pretty scurrilous piece really but the sad thing is some people will actually believe it.
What a serious property website should probably do is research and write an article about referral fees and the relationship with factory conveyancing and how that conflict of interest created by Estate Agents has destroyed the reputation of conveyancing in this country. Rather than give a platform to nonsense such as this.
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The writer doesn’t appear to blaming conveyancers, more the “antiquated” process, and as one of the Bold Legal Group members has quite rightly pointed out to me we have “centuries worth of land law.”
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1. Paying referral fees is entirely a business decision.
2. Conveyancers moaning about cheap conveyancing and blaming agents for this. Really?
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The ultimate solution is that a contract for sale is made available from the outset by the seller for all transactions conditional sale/private treaty or auction. The blame game will continue until this happens. The only way this will happen is if it is led by government and becomes law. The time that this would save for all stakeholders would be staggering!!
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110 days or *working days* from initial listing? Is it 16 weeks or 22 weeks?
Although Moverly seems to be complaining about the conveyancing process, they are referencing the time it takes from putting a property on the market, not it being listed ‘Sold STC’. Their figures actually demonstrate the time it takes to convey is coming down, because properties are taking much longer to go under offer than they were a few years ago and it was reported then that the conveyancing process (not the entire sales process) was taking over 16 weeks.
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