Tales of the heroics conveyancers delivered in the final days of March in the run up to the stamp duty deadline have started to unfold as firms recover from the latest SDLT cliff edge.
The culmination of months of effort and diligence by property lawyers up and down the country came down to just a few days in the run up to the deadline on Monday with many conveyancers delaying holidays and working long into evenings and weekends to ensure that so many people could successfully move home.
The property market has seen a sizeable spike in transactions since no extension of the reliefs for home movers and First Time buyers was confirmed in Labour’s Autumn Budget. From 1st April the threshold at which SDLT will be payable will fall from £250,000 for residential properties, to £125,000. For First Time Buyers (FTBs) they will continue to benefit from a higher nil rate band, but it will now be for properties from £300,000 to £500,000; down from £425,000 to £625,000.
Estimates from home moving group Simplify suggest that during the last 5 days of March 2025, completion volumes across the market exceeded those for the whole of March 2024. Simplify themselves say they completed over 6,500 mover transactions in the last five days of March and paid tribute to those across the sector who made it happen including the many estate agents who have worked in partnership with conveyancers; and lenders who have worked with the profession to issue mortgage offers and ensure funds were ready ahead of the deadline.
“This has been a monumental effort by everyone involved. The dedication and collaboration across the industry have been truly inspiring. We are grateful for the support from the Bank of England and other payment providers, which has been crucial in achieving these record numbers.”
said David Grossman, CEO of Simplify.
There is mixed news for the conveyancing community in the aftermath of the deadline; while the cliff edge no longer looms, any hope of a break may have to wait as many conveyancers continue to report strong pipelines into April and May.
“Activity is likely to pick up steadily as the summer progresses, despite wider economic uncertainties in the global economy, since underlying conditions for potential home buyers in the UK remain supportive.”
said Robert Gardner, Nationwide’s Chief Economist in the building society’s latest House Price Index, adding
“The unemployment rate is low, earnings are rising at a healthy pace in real terms (i.e. after accounting for inflation), household balance sheets are strong and borrowing costs are likely to moderate a little if Bank Rate is lowered further in the coming quarters as we and most other analysts expect.”
Both Zoopla and Rightmove have predicted market volumes will rise by 5% in 2025 to 1.15m transactions and with March, April and May traditionally seeing around 30% of the total number of properties listed for sale each year, the market is likely to remain active.
5 responses
Have to love this.
Nobody asks just how many of these people ‘should’ have completed weeks earlier?
The farce of this proves that conveyancing absolutely operates in accordance with Parkinson’s Law.
Congratulate yourselves all you want. The truth is bad planning, bad management, and poor practice allowed huge numbers to get compressed into a small window.
The response will be ‘everybody wanted it through’. Yet nobody will take a deeper look at the offer to completion timescales for all those that completed in those last few days.
And the ask themselves, ‘how come early March wasn’t busier than it was?’
Clearly you know very little about conveyancing.
What this proves is Matt, stick to commenting about what you know, house removals.
“many conveyancers delaying holidays and working long into evenings and weekends to ensure that so many people could successfully move home.”
I’m not sure why the focus in this article is on volume conveyancers
Most Solicitors work for SMEs of 1-4 partners.
That’s, in essence, High Street or niche firms.
Those working in such firms are capable of working to faster completion timeframes when volume conveyancers aren’t involved in the chain at any time of the year.
146 completions in one day. That is a huge amount of referral fees to be paid out. I wonder how many of those clients would have instructed that firm had Estate Agents not been paid referrals? Not many i’m guessing.