Almost a quarter of property transactions in England fail to complete, causing lost or delayed fees for estate agents and leaving some buyers facing thousands in additional costs, according to Rightmove.
New analysis from the property portal estimates that these fall-throughs represent a missed economic opportunity of more than £900m across England. The calculation is based on 6% of transactions that do not return to the market within a year, using last year’s total of 1.03m housing sales, an average stamp duty payment of £7,590, and an assumed estate agency commission of 1.5%.
Rightmove’s figures suggest that nearly £392 million in potential estate agent commissions and around £515m in stamp duty revenue for the government are lost due to incomplete transactions.
Separate calculations for Scotland and Wales indicate additional missed opportunities of nearly £7m and £23m, respectively, reflecting lower fall-through rates in Scotland and differences in land taxes in both countries.
Johan Svanstrom, Rightmove’s CEO says: “Our analysis highlights the scale of the economic opportunity if fall through rates can be reduced. More than one in five [23%] transactions are affected by fall throughs, costing agents either lost or delayed fees and leading to some home-movers paying thousands in repeat costs.”
Rightmove’s latest data highlights the significant potential benefits if more property chains remained intact. According to the portal, 6% of property transactions fall through and do not return to the market within 12 months, while a larger 23% initially collapse before eventually completing. These figures underline inefficiencies in the home-buying and selling process, with estate agency fees delayed or duplicated and homebuyers facing uncertainty and disruptions to key life plans.
Rightmove argues that greater digitisation and better coordination across the home-moving process are critical to reducing fall-throughs. Last year, the legal completion process for a property purchase took an average of five months from start to finish.
In its response to the government’s consultation on home-moving reforms, which closed at the end of 2025, Rightmove emphasised that digitising property transactions is essential for efficiency, transparency, and consumer confidence. The response referenced faster, more digital transaction systems in countries such as Norway, Finland, and Estonia as models for improving the UK process.
Rightmove also recommended that providing comprehensive, consistent information upfront about property listings could help reduce fall-throughs, increase transparency, and support estate agents tasked with managing complex property chains over extended periods.
Svanstrom continued: “We believe that further digitisation can help to bring this number down. Addressing it will require government investment, innovation across the transaction process, and stronger industry collaboration.
“The home‑moving journey is still slowed down by many manual and fragmented processes. A seller shouldn’t need to list their home in April to move before Christmas.
“Our mission is to build the UK’s leading digital ecosystem for the entire moving experience, creating more opportunities for our estate agency partners and helping consumers move with greater confidence and speed. We believe a more effective system and increased mobility would add to overall economic growth in the UK.”
Responding to Rightmove’s latest findings, Mary-Lou Press, NAEA Propertymark president, said the analysis highlights the very real economic and human cost of property fall-throughs.
She commented: “When a transaction collapses, it isn’t just a lost fee; it represents months of uncertainty, duplicated costs for buyers and sellers, and significant delays to people’s lives.
“Propertymark has long called for reforms to improve the speed, transparency and certainty of the home-moving process. While fall-throughs can never be eliminated entirely, many are preventable with better upfront information, improved communication between parties, and a more streamlined and digitised transaction system.
“Our member agents work tirelessly to hold chains together and guide consumers through what is often a complex and stressful process. Propertymark agents are professionally qualified, adhere to a strict Code of Practice, and are committed to delivering high standards of service that help reduce avoidable delays and breakdowns in transactions.
“We support measures that promote greater digitisation, earlier provision of material information, and stronger collaboration across the sector. However, reform must work for consumers and practitioners alike, ensuring the system is both efficient and robust. Reducing fall-throughs will not only strengthen consumer confidence but also unlock significant economic potential across the country.”
Fall throughs absolutely hammer agents’ income.
You can have months of work, staff time, marketing spend and compliance costs tied up in a deal, only for it to collapse at month five. That is real cash flow damage, especially for independent firms who do not have corporate backing.
What makes it harder to stomach is that smaller agents are already being squeezed. Rightmove talks about unlocking £900m of “missed opportunity”, yet many large brands are reportedly on discounts of up to 90%, while smaller independents are paying the full rate. The shortfall does not disappear, it gets redistributed. That is the reality of a virtual monopoly. Smaller agents subsidise the bigger groups while also carrying the financial risk of fall throughs.
On the solution side, this is not new. Most of the world does not operate on a system where 23% of agreed sales collapse and everyone shrugs. Reservation agreements are standard in many countries because they create commitment and certainty.
We have used Gazeal backed reservation agreements for over five years on nearly all of our sales. Properly structured and balanced for buyer and seller, they materially reduce fall throughs. Not eliminate them, but reduce them significantly. When both sides have skin in the game, behaviour changes.
Digitisation helps. Upfront material information helps. But without commitment, the UK system will always be fragile.
If we are serious about reducing that £900m loss, we need structural change, not just another portal talking about ecosystems.
[Sentence and link removed as it breached posting rules]
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It would be interesting to see how many fall throughs are attributed to advice from Surveyors and Solicitors. We’re selling housing stock that has been altered historically, and without the correct biblical paperwork that some Solicitors insist is required. The bickering and butting heads between egotistical Conveyancers is tedious, prolongs sales with some eventually falling through. In reality an indemnity policy is more than sufficient to complete the sale. Unfortunately, it’s becoming more of a problem, and a legal issue out of the Estate Agents control.
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Solicitors insist is required. Often with pressure from lenders (who are not always prepared to accept an indemnity policy) PII companies, and regulators.
I do agree though, their is too much head butting.
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In many cases, the paperwork just isn’t there because the alterations were completed too long ago. The fact that these extensions have been lived in and used for 50 – 100 years plus without issue seems to be contentious, and without any common sense for a conclusion.
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And the good news re digitisation is that this job is pretty much done. Any agent that wants to get all of the upfront information together, in a digitalised format to ‘conveyancing grade’ standards which can be passed to lawyers (and to their own CRMs to populate the Rightmove schema) can do that today. We’d also add getting the lawyers instructed pre offer into the mix as a way to reduce delays and fall through. The average potential time saving per transaction from our stats by taking these steps is 8.3 weeks.
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Sadly this is old news, nothing new here. From a 2018 Government consultation – Over a quarter of all transactions fail, costing hundreds of millions a year to consumers and causing undue stress to both buyers and sellers. Over 65% of all buyers and sellers are worried whether they will make it to completion following an offer being accepted. Government is particularly interested in the introduction of reservation agreements to address this problem given that a high proportion of buyers and sellers have expressed an interest in up front legal commitment. This will help to reduce the fear of gazumping. We think there are three key areas for improvement: – a better consumer experience; – reducing time from offer to completion; and – reducing failed transactions. The 3 Ws .gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/improving-the-home-buying-and-selling-process-call-for-evidence
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Why don’t estate agents try charging differently instead of whining and waiting for conveyancers to complete the transaction to claim their fees? (which is 3x more than a conveyancer gets paid) There’s lots of reasons for fall throughs – at least if you recovered your costs upfront – sellers may be more serious about selling (this appears to be an attack on buyers and it is sometimes sellers themselves that decide not to go ahead). I would not want any of my clients to be committing to reservation agreements, not whilst we still have hanging around: leasehold, building safety issues and profiteering from management companies regardless of tenure on service charges. Add to that your mix of ‘tick box’ conveyancer paying referral fees for work – your bottlenecks are shuffling work into the neck of the bottle instead of allowing people to choose their own conveyancers (yes I’m talking to you the agents who will conditionally sell to get their referral fee on top of their commission). You’ve made part of this mess all by yourselves in search of the extra £. It’s not like you need it – you don’t appear to be being prosecuted or fined for breaches of AML, etc.
Government continue to bury their heads in the sand and play politics rather than tackle the true causes of delay.
And hello – we also have “chains”.
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