Transforming the homebuying and selling process

Improving the homebuying and selling process remains front of mind for those working in the sector, with the aim of providing better outcomes for consumers one of the priorities. This includes ensuring the best possible use of existing housing stock by making it easier for people to downsize or upsize to the most appropriate home for their needs. 

Before this year’s general election, what was the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (LUHC) Committee initiated an inquiry into improving this process in England, and we very much hope that the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee that has now been created, with Chair, Florence Eshalomi, MP, will focus on this issue. We also hope that new ministers, in particular the new Housing and Planning Minister, Matthew Pennycook, will engage with those of us in the sector who are working to improve home buying and selling in the consumer and public interest. 

Steps towards transforming the sector

As the only regulator solely focused on conveyancing, the CLC is also taking very practical steps, that we hope will lead to improvements in the short term. We have just launched a trial of Third-Party Managed Accounts, offered through Shieldpay, to understand how this alternative to a client account can contribute not just to the greater security of client funds, but also a more efficient and transparent conveyancing process. This is alongside engagement with a range of innovators. 

In the meantime, work continues to improve the experience and deliver better outcomes for home movers in the long term. Upfront information, digitisation and streamlining of the process are all key to ensuring smoother, faster and more secure transactions that will deliver those better outcomes. The demands of operating the housing market under pandemic restrictions played a part in moving things along, but the pace of progress needs to be maintained if we are to deliver all the potential benefits of reform to consumers and the economy.

In the longer term, digitising the process will lead to faster, more secure transactions and save lots of unnecessary paperwork chasing and questions being raised at the last minute about aspects of the purchase, or sale, which could have been known upfront.

If digitisation was placed at the heart of home buying and selling reforms transaction times would have the potential to be reduced from months to weeks, possibly even days in some cases, but that change needs to happen ‘at pace’. 

The work of the National Trading Standards’ estate and letting agency team in pushing forward upfront property information for consumers is to be commended. The team has been working with property portals, and with those across the industry, to ensure more material information is made available on property listings so that consumers can make informed decisions and agents can meet their legal requirements at the very beginning of the consumer journey. The aim, as with all reforms across the sector, is to ultimately provide greater clarity for consumers, this will also save estate agents time by reducing wasted enquiries and will provide greater efficiency.

But can it be done? 

Can an outcome of a digitised process that takes days or weeks instead of months, and which reduces workloads and financial and emotional stress, be achieved? Well, yes, very much so as our Norwegian counterparts will tell you. Norway is a fantastic example of how digitisation can foster a simpler, more transparent process for consumers, without imposing significant additional costs.

In Norway, it takes an average of just 47 days from the moment a person thinks of selling to when the buyer moves in, about three weeks of which is compiling the information needed before the property can go on the market. There are no chains, because of the speed of buying a property, and bridging finance is widely used and easily available for the same reason. 

And this is the vision of the Digital Property Market Steering Group (DPMSG), which has been convened by HM Land Registry and led by sector experts. It wants to create a simpler, faster, more certain and less stressful system. 

Mike Harlow, the Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Customer and Strategy at HM Land Registry, spoke passionately about the Norwegian system at our conference earlier this year, attributing its success to the collaboration of all the stakeholders in the market – lenders, insurers, lawyers and institutions – in designing the system.

He also clearly highlighted the importance of dealing with both residential and commercial property together when introducing reform. He invited the conference to imagine if everybody who was a party to the transaction had a single shared view of what the property is, who the parties are, the terms of the deal and the progress of the deal, then there would be no chasing, no uncertainty, no need to make multiple phone calls to find out where something was stuck. This is what will make the process faster. 

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, this is a future that all of us across the industry are striving for and we are seeing incremental change in several areas. For our part, the CLC will continue to play an active part in helping the DPMSG achieve its aims and more generally to secure crucial progress which will enable conveyancers to deliver better transactions for consumers. We encourage anyone with views on how to digitally transform the land and property market to get involved.