There’s a headline doing the rounds that should make everyone in the property world pause for a moment. Research highlighted by Rightmove suggests fall-throughs in England have cost estate agents around £400 million in lost commission over the past year.

That is a striking number.

Yet the figure itself may only represent part of the picture. The estimate focuses on agreed sales that collapse and never return to the market within a defined period. Once you start to consider how many properties are withdrawn unsold, the true cost to the wider property ecosystem may be considerably higher.

Almost one in four agreed sales collapses at some stage. Some eventually recover and complete later. Others disappear entirely. Each failed transaction represents time, money and emotional energy that simply evaporates. Behind every statistic sits a family that thought they were moving, a seller who had already started packing, or a buyer who had begun planning their new home.

For sellers, it can mean going back to square one.

For buyers, it can mean wasted survey fees, mortgage arrangement costs and weeks of uncertainty.

For agents, it means pipelines that look healthy on paper yet produce no income.

For conveyancers, it often means work carried out with nothing to show at the end of it.

The system feels busy. Listings are up. Offers are being agreed. Mortgage products continue to move around as lenders adjust their pricing. There is activity across much of the market. Yet too many transactions are wobbling long before completion, and the attrition rate remains stubbornly high.

Chains remain fragile. One survey issue, a nervous lender, a late query, or simply a change of heart can bring an entire sequence to a halt. In a chain of four or five properties, the margin for disruption is slim. The longer a transaction drifts, the greater the chance that something shifts in the background - finances, employment, mortgage rates, confidence or personal circumstances.

Then there is the question of withdrawals. Every year a significant number of properties are listed, marketed, viewed and negotiated over, only to be removed from the market without a sale ever completing. Sellers may decide to pause. Buyers may disappear. Prices may not reach expectations. The work involved still takes place, yet the transaction itself never materialises.

Those withdrawals rarely feature in headline calculations around fall-through costs. If they were included, the economic impact would almost certainly rise well beyond the £400 million figure being discussed.

There are wider ripples as well. When one sale collapses, several linked transactions can fall apart at the same time. A single buyer withdrawing can disrupt three or four other deals further up the chain. The commercial impact spreads quickly across estate agents, conveyancers, lenders and surveyors.

Some estimates suggest that once lost stamp duty receipts, duplicated consumer costs and aborted professional work are considered, the broader economic impact of failed property transactions could approach or even exceed £900 million a year.

It would be easy to point fingers at one part of the process. Estate agents might look at lenders. Lenders might look at surveys. Conveyancers might point to delays elsewhere in the chain. The reality feels more systemic than that.

England and Wales still operate a system where offers are not legally binding until exchange of contracts. That flexibility has value. It allows renegotiation if something significant emerges. It protects buyers from committing too early. Yet it also introduces fragility into the process.

The £400 million figure therefore feels symbolic. It represents lost commission, certainly. It also hints at the wider cost of uncertainty that sits inside the home moving process.

This Thursday at 10am on Property Quorum, Gareth Wax will chair the discussion as always, joined by Juliet Baboolal, Silas J Lees, Zahrah Aullybocus and myself, Hamish McLay. Together we will reflect on what sits behind that £400 million headline and what it may be telling us about the direction of the housing market and the pressures building inside the system.

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