I have bought two houses in my life - one around 2000 and I was living there in under a month, but the place was empty and it was my first house and I had deposit and mortgage all lined up - who wouldn't?
Second house in 2015, again around a month to getting the keys and that was with the seller chasing documentation from the council, again the place was empty and I had already sold the first house and had mortgage approval in principle.
This is a people problem not a process problem!!
7 months to sell a flat to a first time buyer , when we had nothing to buy .
Mainly caused by incompetent solicitors (which despite both being local and within spitting distance - hid behind covid as an excuse to drag out the process - like taking 2 weeks to pass on quieries etc) .
Queries that our solicitor could have put to bed by a return email to me without involving anyone else.
Very frustrating, almost got to the point where I was going to pull out and restart with cash buyers only . It was only my wish that it went to a FTB than an investor that stopped me.
It's possible to improve/fix things, however...
About years ago I worked with a small group of solicitors who were applying their collective experience at all stages of the buying/selling process to streamline it - reducing timelines from months to weeks, or even days.
Trouble is, as soon as the governing body for solicitors got wind of their work, they were threatened with being struck off which was game over.
In response to the original question of plans to change it....
There is an organisation in Australia who have had some success with a property settlement solution that streamlines and modernises the whole process. I've no direct experience, but I'm aware that they're looking at how the same platform and principles could be applied to the UK market. Whether digitising paper processes makes it a fundamentally better experience from a buyer or sellers perspective is probably up for debate.
I'm sure it would require the same support and investment from central government that they apparently received in Oz, but it shows that things can change.
The whole market makes for a interesting case study in the application of Blockchain.
https://theconversation.com/how-the-blockchain-will-transform-housing-markets-75691
The only way our move went smoothly was to disconnect the process - sold in England to a cash-buyer and moved into rental. Was a cash buyer in Scotland for a plot of land to build a house - even then the solicitor/estate agent appeared extremely relaxed about the whole process, doing the minimum it appeared until the very last minute. IMO there’s too many people have a vested interest in maintaining the existing system as it results in extra income for surveyors, solicitors, EPC consultants etc.
Let me add our gripes to the thread.
Our house sale has fallen-through seven or eight times since May.
This is largely due to overzealous surveyors making wild, incorrect assumptions regarding our house, and slapping an eye-watering £50k price tag on 'potential remedial work', none of which needs doing.
In response, we hired our own Damp Expert and Structural Engineer to write independent reports which (funnily enough) refuted most of what the surveyors said.
Most offerers weren't serious. Turns out a modern trend among house-buyers is to put an offer on something... but keep looking in case something better turns up. This happened several times to us where an offer we had accepted was withdrawn because the fvckers found something else.
Useless estate agents. We've changed twice. Lost count of they times they had made mistakes or failed to confirm something or were late.
Many viewers cancelled their viewings 20 minutes before they were due to arrive, or simply didn't show up. Several times I took the morning off work to clean and tidy the house, sweep up the leaves out the front etc, only to have them cancel the viewing because they did a drive-by and 'didn't realise it was on a main road.'
We've had serial viewers. One mad couple have viewed twice, but the second time pretended they were viewing it for the first time. Estate agent gets that a lot: people just like a day-out and to be nosey. No intention of buying. You get some real maddos.
Some viewers brought free-range children with them. One was a family of five with three kids running amok. While the estate agent and parents were chatting in the entrance hall, one of the little darlings ripped a radiator off a bedroom wall. Am still wrangling with the estate agent over who should pay to have it replaced.
That all said, it seems to have sold last week. Unfortunately, there is nothing out there to buy right now. As soon as something new appears on the market, the estate agent has to take it 2 hours later off because they've got two days worth of viewings lined up.
What motivation do solicitors have to change the process? The massively inefficient process keep hundreds of small business going.
I think the problem is that conveyancing is far too cheap. You're paying peanuts and then wondering why your Solicitor isn't focussing 100% on your house sale for weeks on end. The answer is simply that to break even he's probably managing 100 in parallel.
I think the problem is that conveyancing is far too cheap.
I'd disagree with that. I'd say it's inflexible. It's done one way and that's it. I've done my own conveyancing a couple of times. Admittedly it was an easy deal, but when I approached a couple of solicitors they still wanted full whack. Took less than a day to do. By contrast I had a particularly complex buy and they still charged standard rate.
Going back to the point earlier, if all the searches and surveys were done first then the solicitor can focus on the legals. Charge more for the tricky ones, less for the easy ones, and speed the whole process up
The legal process shouldn't take five mins or any real focus either. There's a standard Law Society contract, which provides a reasonable balance between the parties. Unless one solicitor is being awkward about something to create noise, or it's an old property with historic terms, there's no reason any transaction in England should be more than following a simple checklist.
A good agent with an interested progressor will eradicate a lot of the problems people mention here.
I don’t think we’ll ever get away from Chains but it’s not helpful when there is very little view of the complete chains movements. The fact the customer cannot easily get a view of the whole chains status, nor the conveyancer or agent for that matter, is bonkers in this software age. The fact that say Connells Slough who’s selling your house and Connells Reading who’s selling the house you’re buying - or configurations thereof in the chain - but don’t know they are on the same team, is mental.
Blockchain will be coming.