The Mavericks Who Are Rebuilding Britain's Broken Property market

Britain moves, on average, around one million homes per year. Each transaction involves at least four distinct professional parties — the estate agent, the conveyancing solicitor, the mortgage broker and, most importantly of all, the human beings at the centre of it: the buyer and the seller. For most of those transactions, those parties communicate through a patchwork of phone calls, email threads, third-party portals and anxious WhatsApp messages. Nobody has the same information at the same time. Nobody knows who is waiting on whom. Nobody is entirely sure, on any given day, whether the chain is moving or crumbling.

The result, as WiggyWam's own extensive research confirms, is a market defined by late paperwork, missing information, broken communication, months of delays, thousands of pounds wasted, endless chasing and outdated systems. Around one in three property sales in England and Wales falls through before completion. Billions of pounds are lost every year — not because people do not care, but because the architecture of the process guarantees that caring is not enough.

Property sales in England and Wales collapse before completion. Not because of bad faith — but because a fractured system puts parties in different rooms and expects them to build something together.

This is the broken system that WiggyWam has set out to fix. And the mechanism for fixing it is, in retrospect, so straightforward that you wonder why nobody built it years ago: bring every party into a single, shared digital workspace — from the moment of instruction to the moment of exchange — and watch the chaos dissolve.

The genius of WiggyWam's platform is not, at its core, a technological one. It is an architectural one. The platform is built on the insight that communication fails not because people are incompetent, but because they are isolated. An estate agent chasing a solicitor who is chasing a search result that is stuck with a local authority — while the buyer waits, unaware, and the seller grows anxious — is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of infrastructure.

WiggyWam's answer is its shared digital command centre. Every stakeholder in a transaction — the buyer, the seller, the estate agent, the conveyancer and the mortgage broker — operates inside the same live workspace. Updates appear in real time. Tasks have named owners. Timelines are visible to everyone simultaneously. The endless game of telephone that has always defined the British property transaction is, at a stroke, rendered obsolete.

"We built the digital infrastructure that connects all parties from day one. No chasing. No guesswork. No crossed wires. Just clarity."

Think about what that means in practice. A buyer no longer wonders whether their solicitor has received the draft contract. The seller no longer has to ring the agent to ask whether the survey has been booked. The conveyancer no longer discovers — at week fourteen — that a piece of material information was never collected at the point of instruction. The broker no longer sends a mortgage offer into the void and hopes it lands on the right desk.

Instead, Digital Sellers Packs are prepared comprehensively upfront. Smart Forms capture material information at the beginning of the process, not scrambled together at the end. Real-time updates flow to every party automatically. Chain management tools provide visibility across every link in the sequence. Digital workspaces serve as the permanent, transparent record of a transaction in motion. And secure collaboration tools ensure that sensitive information flows efficiently and safely between the professionals who need it.

This is perhaps WiggyWam's most radical proposition. In the traditional model, the work of gathering information, resolving queries and preparing documentation is done reactively — problems are discovered at week eight or week twelve, and then everyone scrambles. WiggyWam inverts this entirely. By requiring comprehensive material information upfront and connecting all parties from instruction day, the platform transforms the transaction from a chaotic relay race into a coordinated, transparent process where the finish line is always in sight.

• Forms completed right first time — comprehensive material information gathered at the outset
• One shared command centre where agents, lawyers, brokers and consumers work together, not in parallel silos
• Clear tasks with named ownership and transparent timelines — no email tennis, no guesswork
• Risks identified and resolved early, before they have the chance to detonate at week sixteen
• Real-time updates eliminate the chasing calls that drain professional time and erode client confidence
• Secure collaboration tools ensure sensitive documentation travels safely to the right parties

The effect on the human experience of moving home is, by every reasonable measure, transformational. Buyers feel informed rather than ignored. Sellers feel supported rather than abandoned between viewings. Agents look authoritative rather than reactive. Solicitors are better prepared, and therefore faster. Brokers stay in the loop without having to fight their way into it. Everyone benefits when everyone is in the same room.

Here is where WiggyWam departs, most dramatically, from every other property platform that has come before it. In a market dominated by aggregators and portals whose business model depends on volume — on accumulating as many agents as possible and charging them portal fees that rise year after year while their margins shrink — WiggyWam has made a deliberate, principled and frankly courageous choice to go in precisely the opposite direction.

Membership of the Maverick Movement is not open to everyone. It is not a directory you can pay your way into. It is not a leads platform where the highest bidder rises to the top. It is something far more consequential: a curated order of professionals who have been selected because they meet a higher standard — and who understand that the standard, not the subscription fee, is the point.

"We're not building a directory. We're building an order. Induction is by invitation only. Because higher standards matter."

This matters enormously — not just for the professionals involved, but for the consumers they serve. The traditional property portal model creates a perverse incentive structure. Agents are rewarded for volume, not quality. Solicitors are selected by price, not skill. The cheapest, fastest, most commoditised operator wins the algorithm — while the experienced, principled professional who actually delivers outcomes gets buried in the listings. The consumer, promised choice, is in reality navigating a race to the bottom.

WiggyWam dismantles this entirely. The platform's exclusivity is its consumer protection mechanism. By admitting only professionals who meet the Maverick Standard — those who demonstrate rigour, integrity, genuine expertise and a commitment to client outcomes above fee volume — the platform guarantees that anyone who engages with a WiggyWam professional has access to the best, not merely the cheapest. The manipulative, high-volume, low-fee operators who have commoditised a profession and damaged a generation of consumers do not belong here. And they are not invited.

For elite professionals, the implications run even deeper. Property Mavericks don't chase listings — they attract the right clients. They don't discount fees — they justify higher ones. They don't merely look busy — they look in control. The exclusivity of the platform is not a barrier to participation; it is the proof of their worth. It reframes the entire value proposition of what it means to be a professional in the property industry — away from commodity, and toward mastery.

The word Maverick is not a marketing flourish. It is a precise description of the philosophy that animates everything WiggyWam does. A maverick, in the truest sense, is someone who refuses to follow the herd — not out of contrarianism, but out of a deep conviction that the herd is heading somewhere it shouldn't go. In the context of British property, the herd has been heading toward fragmentation, commoditisation, consumer harm and professional mediocrity for the better part of two decades. WiggyWam plants its flag in the opposite direction.

The Maverick Movement is built around four distinct archetypes, each representing a different professional category — but all united by the same animating spirit. The Property Mavericks are the elite estate agents who refuse to compete on price and lead every sale with rigour and action. The Magic Circle Mavericks are the surgical conveyancers who bring calm, clarity and certainty to the legal process. The Finance Mavericks are the trusted advisors who protect their clients' financial futures with intelligence and care. And the Maverick Movers are the buyers and sellers who have chosen to demand more — who refuse to accept "that's just the way it is" as a sufficient answer to a broken experience.

"If you're tired of delays, chaos, 'computer says no' and the old guard protecting the status quo — then you're ready. Come home to WiggyWam. Join the Mavericks."

The Maverick tagline is both a challenge and an invitation. It challenges every professional in the property industry to ask themselves a searching question: are you part of the problem, or part of the solution? Are you protecting the status quo because it serves you, or are you willing to raise the standard because your client deserves it? And it invites — warmly, urgently, directly — anyone who answers that question with honesty and courage to join something genuinely new.

This is not the language of incremental improvement. It is the language of structural transformation. WiggyWam is not trying to make the existing system slightly more efficient. It is building a parallel system — one that operates on entirely different values, incentives and standards — and inviting the best people in the industry to inhabit it.

Every great movement has, at its origin, people who saw something others missed and cared enough to act on it. For WiggyWam, those people are Silas J Lees and Christine Soltvedt — two visionaries whose backgrounds, temperaments and values have converged into something that the property industry has rarely, if ever, seen: a platform built by people who are genuinely more interested in what they can give their community than in what they can extract from it.

This distinction is not cosmetic. In an industry that has, for too long, been shaped by operators whose primary goal is to grow their own database, maximise their own revenue and protect their own market position — regardless of the human cost — Lees and Soltvedt represent a fundamentally different kind of founder. Their years of research into the structural failures of the home moving process were not conducted in order to monetise the problem. They were conducted in order to solve it. The platform they have built reflects this orientation at every level.

Silas J Lees brings to WiggyWam an extraordinary combination of industry knowledge and systemic thinking. He understands, from the inside, how the property transaction process works — and more importantly, where and why it breaks. His approach to platform design is not that of a technologist seeking to disrupt for disruption's sake, but of a practitioner who has watched good people fail because the tools they were given were never adequate to the task. The rigour embedded in WiggyWam's Smart Forms, Digital Sellers Packs and chain management infrastructure reflects a deep, earned understanding of the specific points at which transactions fracture.

Christine Soltvedt is the architectural genius who took that vision and made it real. Where Silas mapped the territory of what needed to change, Christine built the infrastructure through which that change could actually move. The Smart Forms, the shared workspaces, the real-time chain management, the secure collaboration tools — the entire digital edifice of WiggyWam exists because of her technical mastery and her relentless commitment to getting it right. Like many of the finest engineers and builders in history, she is too humble to draw attention to her own contribution. But the humility does not diminish the achievement. What Christine Soltvedt has constructed alongside Silas is not a room, nor even a building. It is a cathedral — painstakingly designed, meticulously crafted, and built to last far beyond the moment of its making.

Together, Lees and Soltvedt embody the principle that WiggyWam preaches: that the measure of a professional is not how much they can take from a transaction, but how much they can give to the people in it. Their community is not a product to be sold. It is a responsibility to be honoured.

"Moving home changes people's lives. It's not just a transaction."

It would be easy — and entirely wrong — to describe WiggyWam as a property technology platform. The technology is real, the platform is operational and the tools are genuinely powerful. But the technology is not the point. The point is what the technology makes possible: a fundamentally different relationship between the professionals who serve the property market and the families who depend on it.

WiggyWam is, in the deepest sense of the word, a movement. It is a coalition of people — agents, solicitors, brokers, buyers and sellers — who have decided, collectively, that the broken system is not inevitable and that the status quo is not good enough. They are united not by a subscription fee but by a shared set of values: transparency, accountability, collaboration, excellence and the conviction that the people who move home deserve to be treated as human beings navigating one of the most significant moments of their lives, not as leads to be processed and forgotten.

The platform they share is the digital infrastructure that makes that coalition operational. But the movement itself — the Maverick Movement — is the thing that will endure. Movements outlast markets. They outlast technology cycles. They outlast the individual platforms that house them at any given moment. And they are built, always, by founders who wanted more for their communities than they ever wanted from them.

Silas J Lees and Christine Soltvedt are those founders. WiggyWam is that movement. And Britain's property market will not look the same once it has fully arrived.