Project 28 marks first year of 28-day exchange drive

Project 28 — the industry initiative aiming to bring the average time from offer to exchange down to 28 days — has now passed its first anniversary. The milestone gathering brought lenders, law firms, estate agents and technology providers into the same room, and the conversation landed on two connected themes: upfront information, and the re-sequencing of the transaction itself.

The case for re-sequencing

The traditional conveyancing timeline is largely inherited rather than designed. Offer accepted, instruction taken, contract pack assembled, searches ordered, enquiries raised, replies chased. Each step waits on the one before it, and the critical path stretches accordingly. Project 28's argument is that many of these steps do not actually depend on each other — they have simply always been done in that order.

Searches are the clearest example. A local authority search, drainage and water, environmental and any regional specifics are, in practice, data about the property. That data does not change because a buyer has been found. Yet in a large share of transactions, the search order is still triggered by receipt of the buyer's funds on account, several weeks after the property first went to market. In areas where local authority turnaround remains slow, that single decision can account for a meaningful share of the total elapsed time.

Upfront information is the enabler

The upfront information discussion at the anniversary event was not purely about the property information forms. It extended to the wider question of what a seller's file should contain before a buyer appears at all. Title, planning and building regulation documentation, lease information where relevant, and — increasingly — search data commissioned at the point of listing rather than the point of sale.

For firms, this raises practical questions that the debate did not gloss over. Who pays for searches ordered before there is a buyer? What happens if the property does not sell for six months and the results go stale? How do lenders treat search data that predates the mortgage application? None of these are insurmountable, but they need answering firm by firm rather than in the abstract.

What this means for how firms order search data

The practical takeaway for conveyancers is less about wholesale process reinvention and more about pulling decisions earlier where the risk is low and the time saving is real.

Order on instruction, not on funds. Where a firm is confident of the retainer, holding the search order until cleared funds arrive adds days for no risk benefit. Many firms have already moved to ordering on instruction and reconciling costs later.

Know your turnaround times by authority. Local authority performance varies enormously. Firms that track which councils are slow can sequence accordingly — ordering the long-lead search first and running the faster ones alongside, rather than bundling everything and waiting for the slowest.

Use the data when it arrives, not when the file reaches that stage. Search results that sit unreviewed in a case file are no faster than search results that have not been ordered. Reviewing on receipt surfaces problems — an unadopted road, a planning issue, a contaminated land entry — while there is still time to investigate without holding up exchange.

Treat validity periods as a planning input. If searches are being commissioned earlier, their shelf life becomes part of the case plan rather than an afterthought. Lender requirements on search age need to be understood up front, particularly where a transaction may run long.

A direction of travel, not a finished model

Twenty-eight days remains an ambitious target, and nobody at the anniversary event claimed it had been achieved at scale. What has shifted is the shared recognition across lenders, firms and suppliers that the delay is structural rather than individual. No single party can fix a sequential process by working faster within their own segment.

For conveyancing firms, the useful response is not to wait for the industry to settle on a model. It is to look honestly at where in the file search data currently sits, and ask whether it needs to sit there. In most practices, it could sit earlier — and that alone would take days off the average transaction.

See how Searchpoint can help you order and track search data earlier in the transaction.