Understandably, there is a lot of political heat being placed under the current mortgage market particularly for those borrowers coming to the end of their deals.
Just recently, we had the Labour ‘emergency’ summit meeting with representatives from the broker community, and I hope they were able to put across their points strongly as it is they who have been at the sharp end of these issues.
However, to my mind, and perhaps just as important is the nature of the house buying and selling process in this country, and the length of time it takes to get through to completion.
In a world in which digital solutions are rife, where technology should be helping us getting the whole process down to weeks, we appear to be going in the opposite direction – at least when you compare activity right across the board.
The latest figures from Landmark Information Group, as part of a report called ‘Why are property transactions taking so long?’, reveal that the average time to completion in 2022 was 133 days. Back pre-pandemic in 2019 this figure was 104 days, and if you go back further to 2007, the figure was 75 days.
As we all know, a lot of water has gone under the bridge over the last 16 years or so, but to see this represented so starkly goes to show there is still a lot of work to be done, and we are some way from having a system/process which is capable of getting that timeframe down.
Part of the solution lies of course in what we can do as individual players and firms within this system, and if nothing else, there is surely a competitive advantage to be gleaned here from working with trusted partners who work far more quickly than this, and who are specialists in their field.
At a time when the need for mortgage advice has perhaps never been greater, the fact that you are the trusted source of this advice, surely allows you to provide further products and services, which will not only help speed up these transactions, but generate income.
Advisers clearly have a role here in terms of providing clients with advice and recommendations on which conveyancer to use. Certainly, in recent years, more and more advisers accept that role because the consequences of not being involved can be pretty grave.
To begin with, a non-specialist conveyancer is likely to take a greater amount of time to work through their cases than those who carry out this work 24/7, 365 days a year. That’s a simple fact, with non-specialists generally not wanting this work in the first place, and/or having scant resource to be able to put at the client’s disposal.
Family solicitors can be absolutely brilliant in all types of family law cases, but those clients who end up taking their conveyancing to them, are likely to end up waiting longer for that case to complete. And it’s also a rather unfortunate fact, that in our property market, the longer you wait for a case to complete, the greater likelihood of that transaction failing, and everyone having to start over again.
In 2022 the average case was looking at the best part of five months to get through to completion – that is a lot of time for something to go wrong, and we’re probably all acutely aware that a third of all cases don’t ever make it to the end of the process. That is a lot of waste in anyone’s book.
So, while this government has been fairly positive about the need for change in the home buying and selling process, and I’m led to believe that the change required is still firmly on the agenda at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, the other point to make here is that we are not far from a General Election.
And the closer we get to a General Election, the more likely these policies and workstreams go on the back burner. Which will seem somewhat ironic to practitioners and stakeholders because, on the whole, there tends to be little political argument about the need for the home buying/selling process to be quicker.
The other, often incredibly frustrating, aspect to all of this, is that we are not really waiting on anything to get to a faster process. The tech exists, many firms already use the solutions, but as advisers will know only too well, when there are those who either don’t want, or can’t see the need, to up their game in this area, then we are still likely to have a system and process which can’t work at its most efficient.
However, as mentioned, while we await a government willing to mandate the changes needed right across the industry, advisory firms can still do their bit. They can use a platform like Broker Conveyancing, they can recommend their clients use a specialist conveyancer, and they can give everyone a chance to be quicker than the average and get to where they need to be in a much faster timeframe.
Mark Snape is CEO of Broker Conveyancing
