Seven months from listing to completion... but is anyone really surprised?

I read an article in Estate Agent Today with the headline "Seven months from listing to completion – shock new data."

But is this really a shock?

Anyone involved in residential property transactions over the last few years has seen the warning signs. Estate agents, conveyancers, search providers, lenders and brokers have all experienced increasing delays, greater complexity and growing frustration from buyers and sellers alike. The figures may now quantify the problem, but they shouldn't surprise anyone working in the industry.

Rather than focusing on the headline, I think there's a far more important question hiding beneath it.

Why do we still wait until after an offer has been accepted before we begin properly preparing the seller?

The same report suggests it now takes, on average, around 62 days to find a buyer. That's two months during which a seller could be completing property information forms, resolving title issues, locating planning and building regulation documents, answering enquiries in advance, instructing their conveyancer and, where appropriate, obtaining searches before a buyer is even found.

Instead, we largely allow those two months to pass before asking everyone to begin the legal preparation from scratch.

The property industry has become exceptionally good at getting homes to Sold STC. But agreeing a sale isn't the finish line, it's the point where the most complicated part of the transaction begins. Unfortunately, that's also when we expect sellers to start gathering information that could have been prepared weeks earlier.

For many years we've accepted that the transaction begins once an offer is agreed. Perhaps that's the assumption we should now be challenging.

Scotland has demonstrated for many years that gathering more information upfront creates greater certainty and, in many cases, significantly faster transactions. We don't need to copy the Scottish legal system to recognise that earlier preparation has clear benefits.

This isn't about blaming estate agents, conveyancers, lenders or anyone else involved in the process. Every part of the industry is working incredibly hard within a system that has evolved over decades.

The problem is the process itself.

The industry continues to force buyers, sellers and professionals into a frantic period of preparation after a sale has been agreed, when much of that work could have started weeks or even months earlier. Then we wonder why transactions take seven or eight months to complete.

If the average seller is now waiting over seven months to move home, perhaps it's time we stopped asking, "How do we make conveyancing faster?"

Instead, perhaps we should be asking:

"How do we make every property contract-ready before it reaches the market?"

Reducing delays, improving certainty and cutting fall-throughs won't come simply from asking conveyancers to work faster after a sale has been agreed. The greatest opportunity may lie in changing when we prepare, not just how we process the transaction.

I genuinely believe the industry has reached a point where we need to stop looking for someone to blame and start looking for ways to improve the process itself. No single profession created the delays we experience today, and no single profession can solve them alone.

I'd be interested to hear what others think.

Is the next major improvement in residential transactions going to come from making conveyancing quicker... or from making every property better prepared before it's ever marketed?

One final thought.

Change is coming to the property industry, one way or another.

I'd much rather see the industry shape that change itself than wait for legislators and regulators to do it for us.

When an industry takes the initiative, it has the freedom to innovate, test different approaches and discover what genuinely works. When change is imposed from outside, that flexibility often disappears.

Perhaps now is the time for the industry to demonstrate that it can solve many of these problems itself, before someone else decides how it should.

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