A new report estimates property transaction timescales could be drastically reduced without the need for major home buying and selling reform or legislative change. The current timescales of 126 days from mortgage application to completion could be halved, the Future Property Transaction (FPT) Group suggests, if the market were able to operate at the speed of the top 50% of transactions.
The Future of Residential Property Transactions is the culmination of a 12 month programme from the FTP Group, a multi-stakeholder initiative instigated by PEXA. The group set out to overcome challenges such as the “fragmented and confusing landscape of initiatives and the inefficient use of resources caused by stakeholders working in silos,” seeking to create a “regional proof point” in West Yorkshire to provide evidence of ways to tackle delays in home moving transactions.
The report identifies the key issues facing transaction timelines, including duplication of effort, consumer awareness and understanding, industry pressures, and fragmentation in innovation. Drawing on over 40,000 lines of anonymised data from lenders, conveyancers and tech providers, it identifies a series of action points to help address the fragmentation and systemic inefficiency that costs the UK economy an estimated £1.5 billion annually in failed transactions.
Paper processes in identity verification, anti-money laundering and source of funds results in two to three weeks of delays caused by collating and reviewing documentation, the report found, and an estimated 90 minutes of a conveyancer’s time. Digital checks can save as much as 80-90% of this, the FPT Group suggests. Digitisation of local land charges was found to save up to 12 days.
Lenders have done much to bring down the processing time of mortgage applications, the report notes, but the disparity in processing times suggests there are more savings to be made: the fastest 10% of mortgages completed in 31 days, while the slowest 10% took 340 days.
With conveyancing to completion currently taking an average 119 days, the report lays out a series of immediate steps that could improve efficiency by as much as 50%. Instruction at the point of listing would “address the primary of delays in the post-offer stage,” digital onboarding would save further time, as would efforts to utilise the current digital infrastructure available to conveyancers, including centralising LLC1 searches where possible.
Encouraging consumers to better engage with their home move would go some way to resetting expectations, with a “widespread lack of consumer awareness and understanding about the property transaction process, its complexities and the jargon involved” identified during research.
There are also future opportunities to improve the information held on leasehold properties which go further than the current requirements on leasehold management companies, the report notes. The Open Property Data Association (OPDA) estimates less than 1% of the data required to buy a home is currently available in digital format, preventing effective sharing.
The FPT Group also calls on the wider industry to engage with digital transaction pilots. Standardisation should be agreed across consumer communication, with the measurement of key performance indicators in the transaction, including fall throughs, for better benchmarking across the property transaction ecosystem and stakeholders.
Recognising the need for a level of government and/or regulatory intervention, the report goes on to recommend the adoption of a digital identity and trust framework to legitimise data sharing. Suggestions include the standardisation of information available to home buyers at the outset, also known as up front information (including EPC, searches, title information and property details etc; creating a regulatory and policy environment to encourage “pilot to policy” initiatives; and fostering clear interoperability objectives to create a property eco-system.
Intertwined in these initiatives is the recognition of the role HM Land Registry plays in digitising its records and creating a “standardised, geospatially-rich digital land register.”
Commenting on the report, Joe Pepper, UK CEO of PEXA, said:
“The FPT Group was set up to provide a collaborative space in which all industry players can drive progress in the home buying journey. The market is under immense pressure, with consumers increasingly expecting faster progress and clearer updates, so anything we can do to ease the burden for conveyancers who are trying to deliver good consumer outcomes should be a top priority.
“There are clearly steps that we can take to drive progress in the short-term. Longer-term, the Government is quite rightly looking holistically at what positive reforms can support our industry and improve the home buying process. This shared endeavour shows the ability and willingness of the sector to come together and drive positive change. What is critical now, for both the industry, and Government, is to act on this insight.”
Writing in the foreword to the report, OPDA chair Maria Harris said:
“With the recent progress of the Data (Use and Access) Act and the government’s identification of property as a priority use case for Smart Data, the timing of this report could not be more pertinent. The industry must now move from fragmented efforts to a cohesive, data-driven ecosystem. The insights gathered by this group regarding digital identity and data interoperability provide the tangible evidence needed to demonstrate how we can reduce transaction times and failure rates.”
3 responses
The suggestion that transaction times could be halved without any need for government or regulatory intervention rests on a familiar but fragile premise: that the homebuying system is slow because conveyancers lack data, rather than because the system itself is under‑supervised, and increasingly burdened by risk‑shifting from every direction.
Australian conveyancers who already suffer e-conveyancing have been among the most vocal critics of digitalisation precisely because the shift to platform‑led processes has not removed homebuying friction; it has simply relocated it.
Their concerns are not about resisting modernisation but about the loss of professional judgement, the rise of monopoly infrastructure, and the creeping displacement of legal oversight by commercial intermediaries. Those are not peripheral anxieties—they go to the heart of public trust.
The idea that “upfront data” alone will transform the English system ignores the basic truth that information is not the same as assurance. A digitally surfaced title plan does not resolve boundary ambiguity. A leasehold or commonhold pre‑marketing pack does not cure defective management or poor governance. And no amount of “smart data” compensates for the absence of supervision (especially in ‘conveyancing factories), and the professional capacity to interpret risk in context.
This week’s government announcements on “moving to commonhold” and abolishing leasehold (comprised in several hundred pages of text) only underline the point.
When the entire legal architecture of multi‑occupancy ownership is being rewritten on the fly, the notion that transaction times hinge on a few more documents being uploaded at the start of a sale feels faintly absurd. In that context, “smart data” is not a solution; it is a red herring.
I agree with Stephen Larcombe and wish to add the following observations.
Treating legal complexity as something that can be eliminated by aligning all transactions with the fastest cohort is not reform; it is a misunderstanding of the system.
Faster transactions are usually simpler ones. Slower transactions in England and Wales are slow because they carry legal risk — leasehold complexity, historic title issues, management failure, regulatory compliance or lender conditions — not because a PDF was uploaded too late.
There is also a persistent and misleading assumption that concepts and procedures can simply be imported from other, younger and very different legal systems. Australia does not operate a single system, but multiple state-based regimes developed within a far younger legal jurisdiction, largely built around Torrens-style title by registration.
England and Wales is a unitary system, with nearly a thousand years of layered land law, where registration sits on top of estates, trusts, equitable interests and overriding rights rather than replacing them.
Digitisation can reduce duplication, but it does not remove legal complexity. Treating complexity as mere “process friction” is not reform; it is a misunderstanding of the system.
Headline figures about speed may be attractive, but they are a poor substitute for legal reality.
If clients are not allowed to place offers in or place the property on the market without already instructing a firm, paying money on account and conducting ID and due diligence checks not to mention having TA6 and TA10 completed it will save weeks at the outset. How many times do people put offers in on property and site on boarding for 2 or 3 weeks? That would be an instant saving of time.
How many conveyancers report at the last minute? How many times is the transaction then delayed because the report recommends survey, boiler, electrical checks etc which the client then attends to after the searches and enquiries are finished? Report when you get the contracts in and get the checks done whilst the enquiry and search process is in place saving weeks at the end.
How many needless enquiries are Conveyancers STILL raising? I urge everyone to read and understand Vicki Redman’s ‘Grace’ training and actually put it into action.