3 minutes reading time
(659 words)
Too Many Cooks? When Too Many Parties Slow the Sale
Property Quorum – Thursday 11th September at 10am
Buying or selling a home should feel like progress. A forward step. Something you can tick off and move on from. Yet for so many people, it ends up feeling more like gridlock.
This week on Property Quorum, we’re asking whether too many parties are slowing the sale. We’re not pointing fingers, because the truth is, everyone plays a role. Estate agents, conveyancers, surveyors, mortgage brokers, lenders, clients, and often the friends and family behind them all. It’s easy to see how a chain of decisions can become a tangle of delays.
Right now, the stats paint a worrying picture. One in three property transactions in the UK are falling through. That’s up from around 16% just two years ago. More recent industry figures show the trend hasn’t improved.
Over 214,000 home sales fell through in 2025 alone, the highest annual tally since 2021. And when deals do go through, they’re taking longer than ever. The average from instruction to completion now sits around 216 days.
What’s behind the hold-up? A big part of the problem is fragmentation. Communication breakdowns. Misunderstandings between professionals. Information that arrives too late, or not at all. The chain wobbles, and suddenly everything is back on hold.
We’re also still working with legacy systems in many areas. While the rest of life has gone digital, property transactions remain bogged down by manual paperwork, scanned PDFs, and endless emails that clog inboxes. Conveyancer workloads are up, staffing is down, and the result is a process that just can’t keep up with demand.
Another growing issue is the overabundance of data. Software has become very good at extracting information, but it still struggles to refine or interpret what truly matters. As a result, conveyancers are being handed more raw data to sift through, which increases their workload and often generates even more queries.
Instead of streamlining the process, some digital systems are inadvertently making it more complex, requiring extra time and greater scrutiny at every stage.
It’s no surprise that people are getting frustrated. Buyers and sellers are left hanging for weeks without updates. Agents feel like they’re spending half their time chasing progress. And for some, it becomes too much. They walk away. The emotional toll is one thing, but the financial fallout is staggering. It’s estimated that over £8 billion in economic value was lost last year due to deals falling through.
Some suggest that tools like digital dashboards or reservation agreements will make the process smoother. Yet many conveyancers are finding the opposite to be true. The sheer volume of new material now required can be overwhelming. Rather than saving time, these systems often demand more of it, generating additional layers of queries and creating new frustrations.
Ironically, some legacy content from councils is still easier to refine than the sprawling data sets now expected to be interpreted. In many cases, what was meant to streamline is actually slowing us down.
Joining Gareth Wax and Hamish McLay this Thursday are Juliet Baboolal, experienced property lawyer and partner at gunnercooke, Chris Gilsenan, property developer and co-owner of Root Home, and Dave Symondson, Chief Funding Advisor and Founder at DevBrok. Together, this panel brings insight from all sides of the transaction – legal, investment, and development.
We’ll be looking at where deals break down, what can be done differently, and whether bringing more people to the table is helping or just making things worse.
It’s not about blame. It’s about untangling the wires and finding out how we can move forward better as professionals, as clients, and as an industry.
Join us live on Thursday 11th September at 10am, or watch later on the Spilling the Proper-Tea YouTube channel:
👉 https://www.youtube.com/@SpillingTheProper-Tea
For content enquiries:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
For podcast/media info:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Buying or selling a home should feel like progress. A forward step. Something you can tick off and move on from. Yet for so many people, it ends up feeling more like gridlock.
This week on Property Quorum, we’re asking whether too many parties are slowing the sale. We’re not pointing fingers, because the truth is, everyone plays a role. Estate agents, conveyancers, surveyors, mortgage brokers, lenders, clients, and often the friends and family behind them all. It’s easy to see how a chain of decisions can become a tangle of delays.
Right now, the stats paint a worrying picture. One in three property transactions in the UK are falling through. That’s up from around 16% just two years ago. More recent industry figures show the trend hasn’t improved.
Over 214,000 home sales fell through in 2025 alone, the highest annual tally since 2021. And when deals do go through, they’re taking longer than ever. The average from instruction to completion now sits around 216 days.
What’s behind the hold-up? A big part of the problem is fragmentation. Communication breakdowns. Misunderstandings between professionals. Information that arrives too late, or not at all. The chain wobbles, and suddenly everything is back on hold.
We’re also still working with legacy systems in many areas. While the rest of life has gone digital, property transactions remain bogged down by manual paperwork, scanned PDFs, and endless emails that clog inboxes. Conveyancer workloads are up, staffing is down, and the result is a process that just can’t keep up with demand.
Another growing issue is the overabundance of data. Software has become very good at extracting information, but it still struggles to refine or interpret what truly matters. As a result, conveyancers are being handed more raw data to sift through, which increases their workload and often generates even more queries.
Instead of streamlining the process, some digital systems are inadvertently making it more complex, requiring extra time and greater scrutiny at every stage.
It’s no surprise that people are getting frustrated. Buyers and sellers are left hanging for weeks without updates. Agents feel like they’re spending half their time chasing progress. And for some, it becomes too much. They walk away. The emotional toll is one thing, but the financial fallout is staggering. It’s estimated that over £8 billion in economic value was lost last year due to deals falling through.
Some suggest that tools like digital dashboards or reservation agreements will make the process smoother. Yet many conveyancers are finding the opposite to be true. The sheer volume of new material now required can be overwhelming. Rather than saving time, these systems often demand more of it, generating additional layers of queries and creating new frustrations.
Ironically, some legacy content from councils is still easier to refine than the sprawling data sets now expected to be interpreted. In many cases, what was meant to streamline is actually slowing us down.
Joining Gareth Wax and Hamish McLay this Thursday are Juliet Baboolal, experienced property lawyer and partner at gunnercooke, Chris Gilsenan, property developer and co-owner of Root Home, and Dave Symondson, Chief Funding Advisor and Founder at DevBrok. Together, this panel brings insight from all sides of the transaction – legal, investment, and development.
We’ll be looking at where deals break down, what can be done differently, and whether bringing more people to the table is helping or just making things worse.
It’s not about blame. It’s about untangling the wires and finding out how we can move forward better as professionals, as clients, and as an industry.
Join us live on Thursday 11th September at 10am, or watch later on the Spilling the Proper-Tea YouTube channel:
👉 https://www.youtube.com/@SpillingTheProper-Tea
For content enquiries:
For podcast/media info:
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