Conveyancers say they can see a path to home-buying reform

For years, talk of home-buying reform has been met in conveyancing circles with a weary shrug. Successive consultations, pilots and pledges have come and gone, and the transaction has still taken longer each year rather than less. So it is notable that practitioner sentiment appears to be shifting. Conveyancers are increasingly saying they can see a credible path to reform — not because the destination has changed, but because the building blocks are finally starting to look real.

Why the mood has changed

The difference is that the current direction of travel is less about mandating a new process and more about making property data available earlier and in a structured, reusable form. Digital property packs, standardised data schemas, identity verification that travels with the client, and the gradual digitisation of local authority and land records all point the same way: moving effort from the middle of the transaction to the start.

That is a reform agenda conveyancers recognise, because it matches what good firms already do. Front-loading enquiries, ordering searches on instruction rather than after the memorandum of sale, and getting ID and source-of-funds done before the file heats up are all familiar tactics. The policy conversation is now catching up with practice rather than cutting across it.

Scepticism is still warranted

None of this means the profession is naive. The honest practitioner view is that reform will arrive unevenly. Local authority search turnaround still varies enormously by council. Lenders, estate agents and referrers all have their own systems and their own incentives. Upfront information is only valuable if the other side trusts it, and trust in conveyancing is built on provenance — who produced the data, when, and on what terms.

So the sensible planning assumption is not a single switchover date. It is a decade-long drift in which firms that can ingest, check and reuse structured property data gain a steadily widening advantage over firms that cannot.

Where to put effort over the next year

If you accept that assumption, the investment priorities become fairly concrete.

Fix your data entry once. Most firms still rekey the same address, title number, UPRN and client details across case management, search ordering, AML checks and Land Registry submissions. Every rekeying is a risk point and a cost. Reducing the number of places a transaction's core data is typed is the highest-return change most firms can make, and it is a prerequisite for benefiting from any upfront information regime.

Standardise how you order and store searches. If search results arrive as loose PDFs in a matter folder, they are documents. If they arrive with consistent metadata — product, provider, date, property identifier — they become data you can report on, reuse within validity periods, and hand over with confidence.

Decide your position on upfront material. Will you commission searches at instruction on the seller side? Will you accept another firm's pack, and on what basis? Partners should have a stated, defensible answer rather than deciding case by case under pressure.

Measure your own timeline. Very few firms can say precisely how many days elapse between instruction and search return, or between enquiry raised and enquiry answered. If reform is judged on transaction times, firms will be asked for those numbers by lenders, referrers and clients. Start collecting them now, while there is no penalty for the answer.

Process change beats platform change

There is a temptation to wait for the perfect system and then move everything at once. That rarely works in conveyancing, where the caseload never pauses. The firms making progress are doing it incrementally: one integration, one standardised workflow, one removed rekeying step at a time. Each change is small, each is reversible, and together they leave the firm ready when the wider market catches up.

The optimism in the profession is real but conditional. It rests on the belief that reform will reward firms that have their data house in order. That belief is almost certainly correct — and the work it implies is work worth doing regardless of what any policy timetable eventually delivers.

See how Searchpoint can streamline your search ordering and property data — try it today.