A case was presented to the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee regarding the obstacles to improvements and the regulation of property agents.
Timothy Douglas, Head of Policy and Campaigns at Propertymark, presented evidence to the Committee, chaired by Clive Betts MP, on 13 May regarding the obstacles to improvements, and the regulation of property agents.
According to Douglas, regulation is viewed as a crucial step towards enhancing the buying and selling process because consumers will then ‘feel reassured that an agent will provide a decent service, especially if an agent has not joined a professional body’.
‘Regulation would also to contribute to the enactment of other steps such as leasehold and renters reform’, Douglas said.
Propertymark say that new entrants should have minimum qualifications to join the property industry, alongside compulsory ongoing professional development, to acquire the appropriate knowledge to complete the homebuying and selling process properly and continually update their skills throughout their career they also suggest that poor services can be removed from the sector through a universal Code of Practice and a more coordinated approach to redress and complaints handling.
Propertymark’s position paper, The Future of Home Buying and Selling, formed the basis of the professional body’s evidence to the Committee, which was informed by member discussion groups that examined issues with the current system and possible answers.
It states:
“There are too many fall throughs due to the UK’s outdated and inefficient homebuying and selling process, with failed transactions costing consumers £260 million annually, especially when the UK’s system is compared to Australia’s, Norway’s, and the USA’s. Furthermore, estate agents and conveyancers also lose £1 billion, and approximately 4 million working days annually.
“There are substantial variations in how a property sale is completed, and numerous Propertymark members have expressed legal and conveyancing firms behave differently and have different expectations of an agent when working with them.
“Combined guidance covering property agents, conveyancers, lenders, and any other stakeholders involved in the process, will help to enhance this by stating clear roles and expectations and improving coordination between organisations.
“To this day, property transactions still generate an average of 130 documents. With data being hard to access, promoting services to allow all parties to work on documents together and be able to access them in real-time will help permit organisations to cooperate more effectively throughout the process. Improving Land Registry data and removing the post code lottery in efficiency of local authority searches are vitally important for agents and would help speed up the home buying and selling process.”
Propertymark was a founding member of the Digital Property Market Steering Group, and key messages from its latest work discovered that developing an action list to remove paper-based processes and witness rapid adoption of digital ID and secure e-signatures would help speed up the process.
The evidence suggests that the market would benefit from ‘an overarching strategy from the UK Government for housing that sets out the future policy direction across multiple tenures and government departments’.
Timothy Douglas, Head of Policy and Campaigns at Propertymark, said:
“Estate agency is the only part of the home buying and selling process that is unregulated. Not only does this disadvantage consumers, it leaves the industry vulnerable to economic crime, with an estimated £6.7bn of dirty money invested in UK property over the last eight years.
“For the many good agents operating in the sector, the lack of clear regulation leads to challenges such as the restricted access to pooled client accounts reported by our members, which place added pressures on their business.
“With significant new legislation for both the Private Rented Sector and leasehold moving through both Houses of Parliament, it has never been more vital that the property professionals who are essential to its implementation are supported to gain the necessary competencies and those who will hinder the raising of standards are prevented from working in the sector.
“The industry wants regulation and consumers need it – the property sector needs the UK Government to summon the political will to make effective change.”
One Response
For residential property we need to consider an all risks insurance policy the premium which would be a lot less than the combined fees of the vendor and the purchaser and a lender and could be shared between the parties. Idealy there should be no need for Lawyers whose main concern, understandably, is to avoid a claim for negligence.
It is over 60 years since I as a young articled clerk attended a meeting at the Law Society in the Counsel Chamber to discuss the arcane Conveyancing system. Inevitably there are too many vested interests and little has changed since then – on the contrary the process has become more convoluted.
I was taught by the wise old London based managing clerks that when acting on a sale or purchase one should deal with the matter on the basis that the other side was at the best an incompetent fool who didn’t know what he – still a predominently male dominated job in those days – or at the whorst a dishonest crook and one had to identify the problem. Since then Conveyancing has become predominently a rubber stamp job based on the assumption ‘that everything is alright always’ which it usually is. Sitting on the Area Legal Aid Committee gave us an insight into a truly shameful standard of conveyancing. From an insurance point of view it would be interesting to investigate the reality and the risk.
John Merrick