As affordability pressures increase and completion times continue to creep up, Joe Pepper, UK CEO of digital conveyancing platform PEXA, makes the case for pushing ahead with a digital property transaction infrastructure.
The pressures bearing down on today’s homebuyers and sellers are not abstract. Data from UK Finance confirms that mortgage affordability is at its worst for almost two decades, with buyers committing an average of 21.3% of their gross income on mortgage repayments, levels not seen since the 2008.
Meanwhile, the gap between house prices in London and other major UK cities has narrowed to its tightest point since the financial crisis, signalling that affordability stress is no longer concentrated in the capital but has spread across the country. For conveyancers working at the sharp end of these transactions, delay is no longer just an inconvenience, but a significant financial risk for their clients.
Why affordability makes speed a professional imperative
When a buyer is stretched to their financial limits, the period between offer, exchange and completion becomes a window of compounding risk. Rate environments can shift, mortgage offers can expire, and personal circumstances such as employment, health and relationships can change. Every unnecessary week added to the transaction timeline increases the probability that something will unravel. And if it does, the buyers’ sunk costs then make the next transaction less affordable in the short-term.
The headline statistics are, unfortunately, all too familiar. The average listing to completion time in 2025 ran between 185 and 205 days nationwide, and that represents the best-case picture. In roughly a quarter of cases (23% of transactions) sales fall through before completion altogether, a failure rate that costs the broader economy an estimated £1.97 billion each year. For the individuals caught in those collapses, the costs range from lost survey fees, abortive legal costs, and the renewed exposure to a market that may have moved on without them.
For conveyancers, this environment places a new kind of weight on the work. Speed and certainty are not simply client preferences, they are financial protections for buyers and sellers who have very little margin for error.
Putting technology at the heart of the solution
The fundamental issue is that the UK’s property transaction infrastructure remains a largely paper-based, sequential and disconnected system that is prone to delay and increasingly sophisticated fraud. Data does not flow between parties in real time and verification steps are repeated rather than shared. Simply put, the infrastructure around the transaction has not kept pace for the complexity of today’s market.
The contrast with comparable jurisdictions is instructive. Australian property transactions typically complete in four to six weeks, underpinned by standardised digital processes and integrated data exchange. The UK is among the slowest of all major developed economies for time taken from listing to completion. That gap reflects choices about infrastructure, not the inherent complexity of property law.
The good news is that the digital technology to close this gap already exists. End-to-end digital transaction platforms, connected title and identity verification, and real-time fund settlement are not speculative technologies, they are operational realities in markets that have chosen to adopt them.
The digital infrastructure needed to make UK conveyancing meaningfully faster and more reliable is available. This is clearly exemplified by Amity Law’s first purchase transaction using PEXA, which enabled the firm to exchange funds and digitally lodge the title application with HM Land Registry all within the PEXA platform. It also marked a major milestone in being able to provide greater certainty for clients as Amity were able to select a completion time slot, and know that the deal had been completed without any hiccup.
The challenge is coordinated and widespread implementation of this technology.
Collaboration is the essential ingredient
Industry initiatives led by organisations such as the Open Property Data Association (OPDA) and the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT), alongside wider government programmes focused on Smart Data and home buying reform, are helping to establish the foundations for a more digital, connected property market. The government’s ambition to reduce straightforward transactions to as little as four weeks is achievable, but only if trusted data, common standards and digital processes are adopted consistently across the home buying ecosystem.
Conveyancers are not passive recipients of this change. Their daily work reveals where the friction points actually sit, which data transfers stall, and which verification steps create unnecessary duplication. This operational intelligence is invaluable to the design of better systems, and the profession’s active engagement with digital reform, rather than reluctant adoption of whatever is handed down, will shape whether the outcome serves the people at the centre of every transaction.
With affordability headroom at generational lows and the financial consequences of delay more acute than they have been in years, the question is not whether the process needs to change. It is whether the industry will take the opportunity to lead that change, or wait for it to arrive.
About the author
Joe Pepper is UK CEO of conveyancing platform PEXA. He has over 25 years of business process re-engineering experience across the financial, legal and property sectors – the last 10 years in delivering technology solutions to the UK conveyancing and lending markets. Previously he was chief executive officer of proptech company TM Group, where he spearheaded the company’s growth. Other key executive roles include managing director of EDM Mortgage Support Services, business development director for RR Donnelley Global Document Solutions, and banking operations and sales executive roles with UBS Investment Bank and ABN Amro.
