Ed Molyneux argued last week that the agent-ready firm is a four-layer stack — data, skills, hooks and oversight — and that the biggest leverage point this quarter sits in the integration layer most firms have skipped. This week he sets out why the time pressure on building that stack is more urgent than the public roadmap suggests.
If you had been asked in 2010, or even in 2020, to write a roadmap for modernising conveyancing, your natural unit of time would have been the decade. Standards take years to agree, IT projects take years to deliver, and adoption tails take years to flatten. That was the right unit then. It is no longer the right unit.
The next eighteen months will reshape this industry more than the eighteen years either side of them. Not because some technological miracle is about to land — it already has — but because of what happens to a profession when capability moves twelve months ahead of adoption and the work the profession does is already too heavy for the people it has.
Consider the state of play. Document extraction, lender screening, lease analysis, enquiry drafting and routine certificate-of-title checks are each now demonstrably at, or above, the quality of a competent fee earner working a routine matter. Not in a research paper. In production, on real files. None of this required a fresh breakthrough this year — most of it has been quietly true since the back end of 2024. What has changed is that the cost of integrating these capabilities into a firm’s workflow has collapsed alongside them. A piece of integration that would have needed a year of engineering in 2022 takes a fortnight today.
That is the capability picture. The adoption picture looks very different.
Most firms have not changed the way the work is done. A small minority have. Two firms running the same software, taking instructions from the same kinds of clients, can already be a factor of two apart in throughput per fee earner — and the gap is widening, not narrowing. Every new model release, every additional open-source skill, every new integration that slots into a firm’s case management system adds to the lead of the firms that have begun building the adoption muscle. It compounds, and it compounds in one direction.
This is the moment to acknowledge what makes property different from the other professional services watching the same shift unfold. Accountancy and law have capacity slack. Property does not. The job is hard, the training is long, the demographics are unfavourable, and the work has been steadily getting heavier — more material information, more lender requirements, more searches, more complexity per case. There is no realistic hiring path that closes the gap between the work the industry needs to do and the people it has to do it. The capacity property needs over the next five years cannot be hired. It has to come from somewhere else.
That somewhere else is the seventy per cent of a transaction that sits below what I have called the judgment line — the gathering, the cross-referencing, the chasing, the routine checking. The work that, day-to-day, fills a fee earner’s calendar and almost never asks for their professional judgment. Moving that work to agents is not a thought experiment about 2030. It is the operating model of the firms widening the gap right now.
The honest reason most firms have not moved is not technological. In a decade working alongside conveyancing leaders I have heard the same three answers. Nobody owns the work of getting it in — it sits between IT, operations and a partner with no spare hours. The firm’s risk appetite, quality bar and house style are not written down anywhere an agent could read them. And there is no measurement: no baseline on cases per fee earner, no time-to-first-enquiry, no time-to-exchange. So improvement is invisible, and what is invisible stays unfunded.
These are management problems, not technology problems. They are the same management problems the slow accountancy firms had in 1999, and the lesson from that decade is sobering. The fast firms figured out who owned the work, wrote down the standards their automation needed to follow, and measured the change. The slow firms disappeared.
The reason the next eighteen months matter more than the next eighteen years is that the compounding only runs one way. The firms that build the adoption muscle this autumn will be five product releases and twenty workflow improvements ahead of the firms that wait until next spring. There is no version of this in which the gap narrows for the firms that wait. There is only how wide it gets.
The capability is already here. The decision in front of the profession is whether to adopt it deliberately — with the standards written down and the change measured — or to adopt it accidentally, when half the firms in the country already have.
Ed Molyneux is Co-founder and CTO of Moverly and original author of the Property Data Trust Framework (PDTF).
