With the time taken to exchange contracts on a property continuing to lengthen, Propertymark has produced a new report, ‘A Dickensian legal process’, to explore the reasons for the growing delays.
Propertymark’s Housing Insight Report reveals that in March 2016, 78% of transactions progressed from offer acceptance to exchange of contracts within 12 weeks, whereas in March 2024, the figure was just 29%, representing a significant deterioration.
From the data gathered across the UK, it is clear there has been a growth in the number of exchanges taking 13–16 weeks and 17+ weeks, at the expense of those taking 5–8 weeks and 9–12 weeks. The number of exchanges taking 1–4 weeks is generally low and has been relatively stable throughout the last decade.
The impact of the increasing time taken to reach exchange is widely felt by buyers, sellers, and the many service providers that support the home buying process. Whilst there is an urgent need to address this problem, it has been a decade in the making and is extremely complex.
The solution will necessitate change in the realms of people, processes, and systems across multiple domains, each with differing views, resources, and appetites for change. However, the first tentative step, recognising that the problem exists, has been taken by this report, according to Timothy Douglas, head of policy and campaigns at Propertymark.
He said: “It is not new news that the amount of time taken to complete a purchase on a home is becoming increasingly tedious and lengthy. However, it’s imaportant more than ever considering that the time taken to complete is up to six months and longer in some cases, to understand the fundamental issues causing this.
“Our member agents are on the ground witnessing delays and have bought their concerns and thoughts to the fore. Policy makers and the new Government at Westminster need to address these in order to speed up the house buying and selling process to keep the wheels of the housing market turning as it’s a vital cog in boosting the economy.”
Hearing from agents across the UK, the industry body said the reasons for the elongation are multifaceted, interlinked and variable.
‘I think it’s a mixture… I think solicitors are under resourced and don’t get paid in line with doing what they do, so they take on too much work and have no sense of urgency. I think lenders are taking too long to send out mortgage offers. Generally, the whole system is much slower to the previous 30 years.’
However, agents identified key challenges and delays, which they believed accounted for the bulk of the problem. Firstly, agents reported that the sales process is outdated (‘Dickensian’) and administratively intensive. Furthermore, the administrative burden has been growing due to successive legislative changes:
‘Far more paperwork is now required due to increased legislation.’
This is problematic as the existing system was not designed to deal with large information flows:
‘The system of property transfer was designed for much smaller amounts of information to be considered. There is now so much information in the system. It arrives on the solicitors’ desk at different stages and takes time to cross reference the client best interest, lenders requirements and best practice as the conveyancer sees it.’
Agents noted that despite the existence of technology, which could be leveraged to streamline the process, the adoption and integration of these technologies was patchy at best:
‘The system is awfully dated with solicitors having different methods-some do digital, some don’t. It needs to be streamlined and digitised.’
Next, agents identified areas where they experienced regular delays in the production of the information required to progress to contract exchange. This included information flows from buyers, sellers, surveyors, and mortgage providers. However, most agents pointed to lengthy delays in the provision of local authority property searches as a key issue.
Agents posited several reasons for solicitor-based delays. Some suggested that solicitors had ‘slowed’ because of challenges in the operating environment, which had made them more risk averse.
More broadly, agents reported that there was a ‘shortage of solicitors’ meaning that firms were ‘under resourced’. In fact, 59 per cent of agents suggested that solicitor resource constraints were the key reason for extended exchange times.
As a direct impact of resource constraints, it was reported that ‘solicitors seem to be taking longer to action activities and respond than before.’
It should be noted however, that the perceived resource shortage extended beyond solicitors. One agent reported a ‘lack of manpower across stakeholders’, and another suggested:
‘Solicitors are most certainly under resourced… [However], the organisations that surround it are under resourced… The surveyors, banks, and local authorities.’
For balance, it should also be recognised that agents can also be responsible for delays, with some members highlighting that ‘agents also need to have their houses in order’. As one member reported, ‘some agents don’t use a PIQ at instruction’ or ‘fail to disclose material information’.
The full report can be read here.
The over reliance on technology at the expense of qualified/experienced conveyancers by the big players, force fed transactions by estate agents and brokers has distorted the market. Those with a much smaller share who rely on legal thinking can complete a transaction within 8 weeks or so of receiving the MoS.
Technology and its purported benefits is not the solution because lack of technology isn’t the problem.
Digitisation may help but it isn’t the solution.
The solution lies with people. Banks have gone to call centres, factories process transactions and spew out standard enquiries causing delay and the Law Society creates an even longer TA6 to try and manage the Material Information requirements placed on estate agents.
Getting MI collated and the Title checked and perfected by a qualified conveyancer before listing will speed up the process and bring ferry to the process. This will require legislation.
Estate Agents have the data. We don’t need their opinions but an analysis of the data they hold identifying which firms are slow and which are not. Too often the focus is on the volume the conveyancing business pushes through. How about an analysis of each firm’s speed?
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Analysis of speed should enable conveyancing firms to spot very quickly the association between speed and profit, not to mention customer experience.
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There seems to be very little reference to the role solicitors’ insurers have to play in this and the consequential delays. Most solicitors will not act on information supplied by us as agents or what they can find online. So, we can provide a buyer’s solicitor with office copy entries at the time we produce sales memos but solicitors will not apply for local searches until they have the same office copy entries provided to them by the vendor’s solicitor. That said we are experiencing some solicitors now taking the bull by the horns and downloading office copy entries as soon as their buying client advises them about an agreement to purchase. Moving on a buyer’s solicitor will not raise additional enquiries until the local search and mortgage offer have been issued, they will not cross reference the TA6 until that stage. The local search reveals a boiler was installed in 2018 so the buyer’s solicitor requests a copy of the buildings regulations certificate whit tells them no more than the information on the search and certainly would cost them more than £7.92 to raise the question than to download the certificate from Gas Safe register if indeed it really provides any value. All this provides delay, increases the amount of touchpoints solicitors have with their clients and which either costs them more money to service or puts at risk their clients’ perception of the service being provided. So, some very easy wins would be to enable buyer’s solicitors to apply for searches as soon as a sale is agreed, require local authorities to digitise local searches and urge solicitors to engage with their insurers to look for efficiencies that will enable them to produce a more efficient service to their clients.
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Example: sale going through 6 weeks. We chased . Conveyancer proudly exclaims she’s just about to send enquiries..
Start sacking **** conveyancers!
Not a data issue. It’s a bad attitude problem.
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Anyone saying should have chased sooner..
Boring..
Boring..
Boring
Shut up
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How many times a week do you hear ‘ I am waiting for’ from conveyancers / solicitors? It does my head in.
Don’t wait, be pro-active and make that call / email to chase. Surly there is a diary / checklist system / software in place to do this.
And how many times do you hear a conveyancer / solicitor say that ‘they have not received the draft contract pack’. Then you check with the vendors conveyancer and it was sent weeks earlier.
I also find it frustrating that once you have enquired about progress, their is often a flurry of activity. It is almost as if they had forgotten that they are meant to be providing an efficient service to the client until reminded!
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Maybe Propertymark, as the “professional body for the property sector”, should encourage its member Agents not to pay referral fees to those factory firms who are the bane of all our lives? Those referral fees are the lifeblood for those outfits, without them they will cease to exist, and we will very quickly see higher professional standards and, without their stagnating and clogging up chains, increased transaction times.
But while Agents continue to support those factories, I do not want to see them criticising conveyancers, put your own house in order first, do not speak from a position of weakness.
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Could not agree more. Why one would take a bribe over a good working relationship with local solicitors is beyond me.
I work with 3 local firms all of whom communicate directly and quickly with me, use me and I them when problems come up with title / boundaries etc. They even invite me to the odd rugby match but unfortunately I am always working! but will take them up on their offer one day!
In addition , you only need a couple of decent probate instructions a year to cover the couple of hundred quid that these factories offer.
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Hi Anna, I am not sure you quite understand the dynamic. It is the factory firms that pay the estate agents/mortgage brokers the referral fees, not the other way round. There is merit in an agent/broker receiving a referral fee if they actually get involved in the process such that the consumer gets a better outcome.
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Stop the conditional selling and you will see the time scales get quicker. Genuine (not factory) conveyancers are pro-active. Why aren’t people walking around with pre-approved finance? Decisions in principle?
Estate agents make more money for the transaction than conveyancers charge, yet the conveyancer is the one who gets into trouble if anything goes wrong.
To answer question above regarding why things aren’t accepted via estate agents – is that if there is a problem/dispute later on down the line, only statements made between solicitors can be relied upon. (And let’s face it we all know estate agents say all sorts of things to people to get them to commit.)
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I understand you need to be satisfied about the source of information but title deeds are the same whether I give them to you or a vendor’s solicitor. Really this is about covering g a lawyers back, if you put to a buying client “I can do this in 16 weeks and I am confident you will never be able to sue me” or “I have created efficiencies that will do the same job in 12 weeks” which do you think the client would choose. I know for sure you would make more money on a 12 week transaction than a 16 week transaction and hey the client gets a better outcome, how about that?
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Leasehold sales are now taking closer to six months. Freeholds under half the time.
All since Covid and home working.
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