Why the process for buying and selling homes needs to be reformed - Jayne Dowle

There’s certainly an appetite for house-moving, even (or perhaps especially) after all that turkey. On Boxing Day last year, the property portal Rightmove saw a record number of homes listed for sale.

More than 10,000 new properties came onto the market over Christmas, the largest number of new sellers in one day since 2011.

Forget the King’s televised goodwill message, or the Gavin and Stacey Christmas special. What really grabs our attention is the prospect of a new home for the new year.

Far enough away so those annoying relatives can’t ever visit again perhaps, or at least somewhere with a bigger kitchen, but whatever the reason, in 2023, online visits to Rightmove nearly doubled between Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

The interest from serious buyers, measured by the number of enquiries sent to estate agents regarding homes for sale, rather than bored browsers, jumped too, more than tripling (+273 per cent) from Christmas Day to Boxing Day. There were also 17 per cent more buyer enquiries on Boxing Day than the year before.

All this should be music to the ears of the Prime Minister, Keir ‘1.5m new homes in the next four years’ Starmer. The British appetite for homeownership shows no signs of abating. Yet for all the promises, the government is failing to keep pace with the mechanics.

Starmer and his deputy, housing secretary Angela Rayner, are making no secret of their intention to overhaul the planning system to build hundreds of thousands of new homes every year.

However, this ambition is not matched by prioritising reform of the complex, time-consuming and perilous business of actually buying and selling a home in England and Wales.

From approval for a mortgage to completion, for most people, the whole process is like playing a high-stakes, lengthy and costly game of snakes and ladders. It’s generally held to take around five months to move house, but it can stretch into years.

No wonder around one in three property sales fall through, according to research by house-buying firm Quick Move Now; buyers changing their mind, attempting to renegotiate the price or withdrawing after a survey (49 per cent), chain breaking (19 per cent), slow progress of sale (17 per cent) and buyer failing to secure mortgage (10 per cent) are the main reasons.

Even buying a brand-new home can be fraught with issues; mortgage companies refusing to budge for anyone with a less than perfect credit record, valuations going astray, snagging lists incomplete, meaning funds can’t be released, delays with the build throwing everything off schedule. It’s painful, and can be protracted.

In March, the previous government’s cross-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee launched an enquiry, with the vow to “explore the chief obstacles to improving the home buying and selling process, in particular the lack of transparency around conveyancing services, the payment of ‘referral fees’ and the weak regulation of estate agents.”

Evidence – 85 submissions in total - was given in May from industry leaders. And then of course, along came the General Election.

Since then, it’s all gone quiet. Recommendations mooted included the introduction of binding reservation agreements to prevent either buyer or seller pulling out, and to prevent gazundering (the buyer reducing their offer at the last minute) or gazumping (the seller accepting a higher offer).

There were also valuable arguments put forward for valuation and structural surveys to be undertaken much earlier in the buying schedule to flag up potential problems in good time, to reduce the possibility of sales falling through. Plus, further digitalisation of land records and local council property searches to speed up conveyancing, and a clampdown on ‘conveyancing factories’, where progress can grind to a halt.

“The one thing everyone agrees on is that the existing process for buying and selling homes in England and Wales is an embarrassment,” said Paula Higgins, CEO of HomeOwners Alliance. She’s right. With his international reputation to think of too, perhaps Starmer should consider putting reform to the top of this New Year to-do list.