Ask anyone involved in home buying and selling for their opinion about the process and you normally get the same response.
A sad intake of breath followed by the pronouncement that “the system is broken… we need to rip it up and start again”.
Which is why we see so many press announcements from well-meaning individuals who, having experienced the frustration of trying to buy a two bed Victorian conversion in Tooting, have built a new technology that is going to “revolutionise the home buying and selling process”.
The problem is that people have not actually analysed where the real issues lie, which makes solving them rather tricky and results in the blame typically being laid at the door of “lazy and incompetent lawyers”.
IT’S NOT BROKEN ENOUGH
The two current threads of silver-bullet-thinking for making the process quicker is to provide information up front or for the government to step in and mandate change.
Ironically, the last time the government mandated change, it was to mandate Home Information Packs which contained information up front, which didn’t end terribly well.
The problem with the broken process argument, is that over a million properties successfully change hands every year.
Sure, it’s slow, frustrating and pretty miserable, but we can say with confidence that it definitely isn’t broken. Which makes fixing it quite a challenge.
The real issue is that the process isn’t broken, enough – if people couldn’t buy properties at all, the lenders for one would step in and do something about it.
THE REAL ISSUE
It’s the grit in the machine that is the major cause; a combination of small factors that collectively cause delay and frustration – death by a thousand cuts as it were.
Misspelt client names, incorrect lawyer details on memos of sales, dependence on individual lawyers caused by reliance on paper files and delays organising financing.
“The elephant in the room is a tricky one to solve.”
These small delays add up but the elephant in the room is a tricky one to solve.
We’re dealing with a highly stressed and emotional public with complications and distractions in their lives.
We can provide onboarding phone apps and they still take three weeks to get around to it.
They ask about the diameters of central heating pipes, so their lawyer must raise this as a pre-contract enquiry, or they will switch lenders the day before exchange, because of a better deal.
WE CAN FIX THIS
No single technology will address the frustrations involved in buying and selling properties, despite the promises that AI is coming to save us.
Clients will take days to respond to questions, they will take up lawyer’s time by frequent calls for updates, and change their mind, for no particular reason.
Which means we must improve the areas we can control – capture information accurately, use technology to check details and documents and keep lawyer caseloads manageable by charging appropriate fees.
Despite the optimism of those building platforms to revolutionise the process, it will come down to marginal gains to reduce timescales.
Although, it’s worth remembering that no-one actually wants to exchange in three weeks, as they’d have to find something else to complain about.
