The requirement and desire for Upfront Information in the property sector is building momentum. With the National Trading Standards’ three-phase project on Material Information affecting estate agents well underway, there are many industry groups encouraging conveyancers to follow suit and provide information earlier in the homemoving journey.
You have the Home Buying and Selling Group which is encouraging law firms to be more proactive. They’re driving for information to be provided at the point of marketing the property. This is to speed up the process, avoid properties being mis-sold and help to reduce Fall Throughs; an industry-wide problem.
The Bold Legal Group is also championing Upfront Information. It found that 4 in 10 sellers would pay for a quicker sale. The time it takes to exchange a property in England and Wales stands at 115 days in 2023 according to TwentyCi data. This is a lengthy wait of 3.7 months to progress from agreeing on a sale to exchanging, resulting in frustration from buyers and sellers who just want to move on. Upfront Information could help to reduce that figure. Concerningly, the Bold Legal Group also identified that 51% of conveyancing firms had never heard of Upfront Information. Only 20% had already adopted Upfront Information, while just under 30% had no intentions of implementing it.
What is Upfront Information?
Since the Bold Legal Group’s survey identified that over half of conveyancers are not familiar with Upfront Information, it’s worth us elaborating. Upfront Information encompasses details about a property from land registry searches and other relevant data a buyer may need to know, such as the already mandatory EPC. The idea is that the conveyancer creates the property file and collates the majority of information as soon as the property is instructed, rather than waiting until it is Sold Subject to Contract. Whilst the survey would still be pending, providing the buyer with a significant portion of information upfront empowers the buyer to make a better-informed decision on whether to submit an offer.
Without this information, it could lead to a scenario where the buyer has to wait until searches come back later down the line to discover the property is not suitable for them. Consequently, if this results in the buyer withdrawing from the transaction, it will mean a waste of everyone’s time and effort, once they’re already well into the process. Had the buyer been equipped with this information from the outset, they would have likely never made an offer in the first place.
This is where National Trading Standards’ three-phase project works well. Estate agents cannot omit certain information when they market a property. Buyers have better visibility of whether a property is right for them. The three parts of the process are:
- Part A – This is Material Information. When marketing a property, Estate Agents must list the property, tenure, sale price, council tax band, rent and rental deposits for lettings and percentage share for shared ownership properties. (This became mandatory at the end of May 2022.)
- Part B – Work in progress but will apply mainly to utility information.
- Part C – Again, work in progress but will include additional Material Information.
As well as groups actively promoting Upfront Information, there are also several businesses trying to get ahead of the curve and developing what are essentially logbooks for residential properties. They are anticipating the growing demand and potentially legal need for Upfront Information.
There are platforms out there to help the conveyancer should you need assistance. Coadjute recently announced its Digital Property Data Pack. This automatically collates data from sources such as the HM Land Registry. The tool is essentially a reinvention of the Home Information Pack (HIP) of the early 2000s. Tools like Minerva and Perfect Portal can digitally onboard your clients quickly, making them ideal for speeding up the whole process for both you and the client.
What are the benefits for conveyancers of Upfront Information?
Something needs to be done to speed up the process and make it fairer for the buyer. Whilst it may feel like an admin burden, Upfront Information is beneficial for conveyancers too. In fact, anyone involved in the sale of a property has a vested interest in making the process smoother and more reliable.
As a result of how busy the property market was in 2021, transaction times have skyrocketed. Fallen Throughs have also increased from Q1 2023 to Q2 2023 by 10.2%, costing buyers hundreds of pounds. There’s a correlation: when the transaction time is high, these types of delays ultimately result in buyers withdrawing their offers.
This initiative will enhance industry efficiency, saving valuable time and money. Collating comprehensive property data during the marketing phase can significantly speed up the completion of transactions. By reducing the time that the transaction takes with Upfront Information, Fall Throughs should therefore drop. Many law firms adopt a ‘no win, no fee’ pricing approach, so fewer Fall Throughs are beneficial for protecting this pricing strategy.
Residential conveyancers Thomas Legal and Conveyancing Data Services carried out a year-long pilot of using Upfront Information. They found that transaction time was reduced by as much as 53 days. If you can achieve similar results from introducing Upfront Information, this will really be something to shout about to win new conveyancing leads. The Scottish Home Report found similar results with transactions dropping by up to 4 weeks. They also found that Fall Throughs fell by a massive 60%. These are powerful results, showing the potential that Upfront Information has.
That’s not all. The introduction of Upfront Information fosters transparency, thereby instilling greater confidence in both buyers and sellers and stimulating market growth. The buyer has a better understanding of what they’re purchasing from the outset so there is less likely to be any surprises further down the road that would cause them to withdraw their offer. Therefore, you won’t have done all that work for nothing, and files won’t be sitting around waiting for a new buyer. You’ll also have an advantage over your competitors as you can position your business as forward-thinking by promoting that you use Upfront Information.
By carrying out some of the legal work sooner, conveyancers can detect and resolve potential issues or discrepancies at an earlier juncture, effectively mitigating delays that could arise later in the process. It will also help you to foster a stronger relationship with your clients. You’ll communicate with them right from the start of their homemoving process and build up trust with them. When you have that stronger connection, your clients are more likely to come back to you the next time they move. Ultimately, Upfront Information helps to make homemoving less stressful for all and offers a more reliable future for property transactions.
How can TwentyConvey and Upfront Information help conveyancers find leads?
With Upfront Information likely to be mandatory at some point in the near future, conveyancers need to be on the front foot. This is where TwentyConvey can help. Our Convey Alert tool can notify you of when your past clients have put their properties on the market again. You can then reach out to these homemovers earlier in the process. Why pay for an Estate Agent referral fee to get your own clients back? With Convey Alerts, we can tell you when your former clients have instructed, so you can reach out to them directly. Instead of waiting until the client is at the Sold Subject to Contract stage, we’d recommend opening a file at the time of listing and gathering all Upfront Information at this point.
With our Market Insights tool, we can give you analytics on how fast you’re moving your clients along the process. We can help you monitor your performance, tell you how many days it takes you to complete transactions and compare it with that of your competitors. By implementing the Upfront Information strategy, you can reduce your transaction time and then market how fast you are to your potential clients! This is a strong way to win new business. After all, no one wants to wait months to move home, so the faster you can process transactions, the better. Having Upfront Information can speed up the transaction time by weeks. You can also identify your Fall Through rate and measure how Upfront Information has potentially reduced this after a period of time. Interestingly, in Scotland, where Upfront Information is required, TwentyCi found that only 14% of properties that have a Sale Agreed also have a Fall Through in 2023. When you compare this to England, the Fall Through rate is double that figure, at 28%. This could be the potential influence that Upfront Information can have on a property transaction.
What’s more, our data can also help you identify estate agents in your region that have high Fall Through rates or take a long time to sell their properties. If you’re finding that Upfront Information has helped you to reduce your transaction rate, then you could then reach out to such Estate Agents and offer to work with them to provide their clients with a speedier service overall.
Final thoughts
As we’ve outlined, the way things are heading with Upfront Information, you need to initiate the legal process sooner. Whilst full Upfront Information like the infamous HIP isn’t mandatory yet, it definitely seems to be heading that way as revealed in the government’s Levelling Up white paper. They identified the need to reduce the number of Fall Throughs and make it easier for first-time buyers to purchase a property.
It really would pay to get ahead of the curve and have a solid Upfront Information process in place before it becomes a legal requirement. With New Instructions for estate agents still on the rise (up 10.6% from Q1 2023 to Q2 2023), it pays to be aligning yourself with this stage of the homemoving journey as there is ample opportunity to go after. Ultimately, conveyancers need to embrace the change or get left behind in the dust!
TwentyConvey uses market intelligence to help generate conveyancing leads for its clients. We possess the most extensive property market dataset in the UK. If you’d like to find out more about our Convey Alerts or Market Insights tool, contact us. We also offer a consultancy service and are happy to talk to you more about why you should embrace Upfront Information. Get in touch with us today.
One Response
We have been here before with the HIP. This does not appear to be anything other than that but disquised as something new! My experience the first tme round was that the contents of the pack were out of date before a buyer was found. There were many clients who could ill afford to pay for a pack and it did not cut the length of time to reach that all important goal, the completion date. Often the delay is with a survey, and/or the issue of a mortgage offer or completing the chain amongst other things. I wonder how long it will be before experiment Rehash will prove to be as unworkable as experiment HIP?