The need for speed

The Conveyancing Association’s Beth Rudolf examines the progress being made towards speeding up the conveyancing process and the provision of upfront information on properties for sale

This year is already shaping up to be a significant one for the UK housing market.

The recent ‘Levelling Up’ white paper issued by the government shows that housing disparities across the country are one of the key areas it wants to address. That means ensuring more first-time buyers get onto the housing ladder in all regions, increasing the supply of affordable housing, reforming planning to help smaller and medium-sized developers in particular to build new homes, and, rather importantly for the Conveyancing Association, looking at speeding up the home buying and selling process and cutting down on the number of aborted transactions.

That latter aim is there in black and white: “The UK government and the industry will work together to ensure the critical material information buyers need to know – like tenure type, lease length and any service charges – are available digitally wherever possible from trusted and authenticated sources, and provided only once. If necessary, the UK government will legislate.’

If you were looking for an honest opinion on how the above might play out, it’s clear that, while the industry is fully able to come up with the solutions required to make the above a reality – and already has – it is likely to be necessary for the government to mandate and legislate to secure the outcomes it wants to see.

Upfront information

It’s understandable, therefore, that the provision of upfront information to prospective purchasers, the conveyancers involved in the process, and indeed all practitioners and stakeholders, is an absolute priority for both the Conveyancing Association and the many other organisations and firms that have played a considerable role already as part of the Home Buying & Selling Group (HBSG).

For example, we now have the Buying & Selling Property Information (BASPI) dataset and a Property Pack Available concept for those properties which have all the required information available at point of marketing. There are property logbooks that will house a whole host of information available, secured digitally for each property, digital identification and verification, and standard wording for reservation agreements to stop gazumping and the like.

All of the above, and much more, are focused on providing far greater clarity and certainty around the home-buying process. They are designed to ensure the consumer – remember them? – can be confident about what they are putting an offer in on at the point that they make that offer. This avoids finding nasty surprises down the line which, had they known from the outset, would have impacted on their decision.

Cutting completion times

It means we can cut weeks off the average time to completion with less chasing of information, and ultimately should see the conveyancer dealing with far fewer stressed-out clients. This is vital in an industry where the last 24 months have been exhausting with lockdowns and stamp duty discounts meaning law firms have been swamped with pressure from stressed consumers, estate agents and other law firms.

It is no wonder fewer than a quarter of CILEX practitioners work in conveyancing now; it was over 30% when I became a legal executive.

"The industry can expect far less duplication of information and tasks because there will be one source of truth that all practitioners can rely upon" 

The industry can expect far less duplication of information and tasks because there will be one source of truth that all practitioners can rely upon, which, via technology, can be shared across multiple platforms. The technology sub-group at the HBSG has brought together systems across the industry and is looking to deliver a Property Data Trust Framework (PDTF) to enable the provenance of data to be authenticated.

The reason for this is simple. With the best will in the world, you would put more store in the information provided, for example, by the local authority than you would by a previous owner. Again, we want all parties to be fully confident in the data that feeds digitally into the BASPI and property pack.

The group has a proof of concept demonstrating how this works. We now need a public body to take ownership of that and enforce it, in the same way we did with open banking, for example. We need a body that can induct suppliers of the information into the scheme and audit them to provide confirmation they are delivering to the PDTF.

Consumer backing

As you might be able to tell, we are a long way down the road on this and there is considerable consumer backing for it. The Conveyancing Association carried out consumer research last year and 98% of consumers said they thought upfront information was a good idea and would pay over £300 for it.

We are aware, however, that there are some considerable barriers to overcome, not least the urban myths that upfront information would reduce stock levels and increase liability. The opposite is true in Scotland, where the number of properties going on the market compared to England and Wales has not changed since they introduced the Home Report, though their number of fall throughs is less than a third or ours and transaction time routinely four weeks faster. Professional indemnity insurers tell us that providing information upfront will reduce complaints and claims.

There are, of course, other priority areas for the Conveyancing Association, perhaps notably leasehold reform. We remain very focused on those priorities but we need your continued backing to be able to keep moving in the right direction and to keep highlighting to government what they are likely to need to do in order to get us to the right destination.

Beth Rudolf is director of delivery at the Conveyancing Association