Why Does This Exist?
The British housing market is failing the very people it claims to serve, and the people who are called to serve them. Fall-throughs waste hundreds of millions a year, transactions drag on for five to six months, and nearly 8,000 of the country's ~23,000 estate agencies are in significant financial distress. After 30 years of talk from government and trade bodies, nobody has actually stepped up to lead the change. So we are.
What's The Mission?
Following completion of our 130-page white paper cross-sector review of the housing market, we produced a Manifesto called Getting Britain Moving. The mission of The Maverick Movement is to deliver The Maverick Manifesto For Housing Market Reform – seven pledges designed to reform the housing market through three measurable goals: end the fall-through crisis, reduce the time to move home to 6–8 weeks, and (arguably most importantly), restore the status and professionalism of the property professionals delivering the change.
Why You?
If you've been in the property space for more than a few years, you'll know the current crisis undermining the housing market. One in three property transactions in the UK now collapses before exchange of contracts. The average time to move home has roughly quadrupled since 1995, despite every piece of technology we've gained over the years. And of the homes that do get listed for sale, only around half ever actually find a buyer.
Every year, millions of families are left living in limbo — unable to plan a school move, a job change, or simply their own lives — because the process they're relying on is working against them. Almost every other industry has been transformed by technology over the last thirty years. Property, by most of the measures that matter to the people living through it, has gone backwards.
The reason isn't a lack of effort from any one group. Estate agents, conveyancers, surveyors, mortgage brokers, buyers and sellers all play vital rolls. The core problem is that nobody unites them. There's no shared workspace, no single source of truth, and no professional body holding the whole process — and the people in it — to a higher standard.
That's what we set out to fix: a 130-page white paper and a seven-pledge manifesto setting out the reform that's needed, paired with an efficient digital infrastructure to deliver it. The WiggyWam property platform is that infrastructure — a single workspace where every professional on a transaction works from the same information, instead of nine different systems that don't talk to each other.
But infrastructure alone doesn't fix a culture problem. That's where the Maverick Movement comes in: bringing together the best of the best across the profession to lead the reform the industry has been promised for thirty years and never received. Until now.
What Is The Maverick Movement, In A Sentence?
It's a community of the best property professionals in the country — Maverick estate agents, conveyancers and mortgage advisers — who've come together to lead the reform the industry has been waiting on for three decades, and to give the public a mark they can actually trust when they're choosing who to work with.
What's Actually Broken That Makes This Necessary?
We've covered some of the core statistics earlier, but behind every one of those statistics is a family stuck in limbo. The market isn't slow because moving house is inherently complicated — it's slow because the people who touch a transaction rarely work from the same information, on the same timeline, with the same incentive to get it over the line.
One of the core areas that needs to change is isolated working practices. Imagine a football team trying to win a game with each player playing on a different pitch. That's what's happening in the property world. Isolated systems serve each profession with no-one linking them all together with the same core objective – to help the client move home. The Maverick Movement unites the best property professionals under that same aim, whilst the WiggyWam property platform provides the digital infrastructure to ensure everyone is on the same page working towards the same goal.
Hasn't Government Already Tried To Fix This?
Repeatedly, and it hasn't worked. There have been roughly fifteen housing ministers in the last seventeen years — nobody stays in post long enough to see a reform through from start to finish. The current government proposals aim to cut four weeks off the average move. That's worth having, but it doesn't touch the underlying problem, which is structural, not procedural.
And don't forget – the only lever the government has to pull is that of more regulation. That's fine if we want to tie the whole market up into a straight-jacket and increase the costs of doing business, but its not going to make the process any more efficient.
So, The Answer Isn't Just More Regulation, Then?
It's the obvious lever for government to pull, but it's the wrong one. The conveyancing profession in particular is already heavily regulated, and compliance has a cost that ultimately lands on the consumer. One major UK bank reportedly invested £225 million trying to streamline the home-buying process and only managed to shave four days off the average transaction — because it targeted one slice of the process in isolation rather than fixing the lack of coordination between everyone involved. More rules layered onto a fragmented system won't fix the fragmentation. They just make it more expensive to comply with increasing inefficiency.
So, What's Actually Missing?
Two things. First, a shared digital infrastructure — which is what WiggyWam is for: one workspace, one set of facts, everyone on a deal working from it together instead of duplicating and re-checking each other's work. Second, and just as important, an easily recognised higher standard of professionalism that the public can actually rely on.
Industry standards have slipped badly over the last decade, and COVID accelerated it — roughly 13% of the conveyancing profession left the sector during that period with many experienced practitioners choosing to retire rather than put up with the chaos any longer. Much of that experience has unfortunately been replaced by newer, less experienced practitioners still finding their feet.
Good infrastructure can't compensate for that on its own. You need both.
Who Exactly Are The "Bad Actors" You're Talking About?
We're certainly not talking about every agent or conveyancer who's had a deal fall through — that happens to good professionals too. We mean the ones who overvalue a property to win the listing, undercut on fee to make the pitch look attractive, and then aren't around when the deal hits a snag six weeks later — because they were never relying on the sale itself to make money.
They were relying on referral fees from solicitors and other panel providers further down the chain. We had a national agent admit to us that "estate agency is the break-even, referral fees are the profit". We're aware of branches where something like four-in-five listed properties never actually sell, yet the agent is paid regardless, because most of their fee was taken upfront.
A Maverick's reputation is built on successful, and profitable, completions, not listings.
What's The Difference Between A Property Maverick, A Magic Circle Maverick And A Finance Maverick?
They map to the three points in a transaction where things most often go wrong. A Property Maverick is the best of the best on the estate agency side — the person actually selling the home. A Magic Circle Maverick is the same higher standard applied to conveyancing — the legal process that derails more deals than almost anything else. A Finance Maverick is the mortgage adviser equivalent, making sure the funding side doesn't become the reason a chain collapses. Together, they're designed to cover the three professions whose failures most commonly cause a deal to fall through.
Can I Just Buy Maverick Status For Myself Or My Whole Team?
No — and that's deliberate. Unlike other membership groups, becoming a Maverick isn't a pay-to-play membership club or a public-facing badge with a price tag, because the entire point of the designation is to give the public something they can trust precisely because it can't be bought.
What we look for in each individual, and how we verify them as a Maverick, is something we're keeping close to our chest for now — frankly because we'd rather not hand others in the property world a blueprint they can rip off and water down – undermining the efforts of true Mavericks up and down the country.
Is Becoming A Maverick A Company-Wide Thing, Or Does It Apply To Me Personally?
It sits with the individual, not the brand. The title of Maverick is bestowed on the person who's demonstrated the higher standard, not to a logo on an office window. In practice, that means a firm can have one outstanding Maverick on the team and several colleagues who haven't met the bar yet — and in the early stages of the movement, that's entirely likely. Over time, firms that build up a critical mass of Mavericks will naturally start to stand out. But Maverick status will never be something a company can just buy on behalf of staff who haven't personally earned it – that would completely undermine the point of doing this.
What Does It Cost, And What's Actually Expected Of Me — Time, Effort, Energy?
We're not running this as a pick-and-mix price list, because — as above — the title isn't for sale. What it actually costs, in practical terms, is closer to what you'd expect from any professional standard worth having: a track record the rest of the industry can verify, and a willingness to be held to it publicly, in how you handle every transaction, not just the easy ones. You'll be expected to commit to the highest standards, which is usually only a burden to those willing to cut corners or put their own needs above those of their clients.
We passionately believe in a job done right and let's be clear, this is your movement as much as it is ours. We find good practitioners across all professions are sick and tired of bad actors and bad practice undermining their work and their own reputation. Nowhere is this more critical to fix than in the profession of estate agency.
When the public can't determine good from bad, the only choice they can make is based on price alone. We believe you deserve more than having your years of expertise reduced to a line of code on a price comparison site, or undermined by cut-price competitors. With The Maverick Movement, you'll finally be paid what you're worth.
How Does Someone Actually Become A Maverick?
It starts with completing a short questionnaire to join our current waitlist. You can find the application form here: https://wiggywam.co.uk/pmapplication
If that goes well, the next step is a structured interview — currently with our founder, Silas J. Lees — working through a standard set of questions designed to establish whether there's a genuine fit, not just to tick boxes.
It's worth being clear about what this isn't: it isn't a professional body you can pay your way into, and it isn't a qualification you collect by turning up. A lot of the organisations already operating in this space have chased volume — more members, more fees — at the direct expense of standards, which is a large part of how the industry ended up where it is. We're building a sacred order of property professionals – not another association. People aren't enrolled. They're invited.
If someone isn't accepted, we tell them why, so there's something concrete to work on if they want to come back and try again later. What happens after acceptance — the induction itself — is one of the things we're keeping deliberately private and strictly confidential. The induction process, and what follows after are only meant to be experienced by the trusted property professionals stepping into it and embodying the Maverick way.
Once Someone Earns Maverick Status, Is It For Life, Or Does It Need Renewing?
No status is for life, and that's intentional. Everyone joins at either Initiate or Bronze level, and the difference between the two comes down to one specific thing: whether they're currently giving or receiving referral fees. If they are, The Maverick Movement provides a twelve month initiation process to move away from the toxic referral fee model by actively teaching a profitable alternative business model. That shift matters more than it might sound: the movement isn't only about raising standards, it's about proving that higher standards and a healthier business actually go hand in hand.
From there, professionals progress through Bronze, Silver and Gold, with an Elite Black status reserved strictly for those who give the most back to the movement itself. Status is reviewed every year based on merit. Conversely, any confirmed breach of conduct means immediate removal from the sacred order. We can't let one bad actor inside the movement which would undermine the trust the whole thing depends on.
Does Becoming A Maverick Mean I Have To Use WiggyWam, Or Vice Versa?
No — the two are independent. You can hold Maverick status without ever using the WiggyWam platform, although we'd recommend it because Mavericks are exactly who we built the system for! You can use WiggyWam without applying to become a Maverick at all.
What Maverick status adds on top is access to a genuinely elite peer group — professionals who share best practice with each other and actively coordinate to keep deals moving as fast as possible. It's worth being precise about what that is and isn't, though: it isn't a networking club, and we have no interest in building one. It's a sacred order of people who hold each other, and themselves, to a standard most of the market has stopped expecting – and that is why it will succeed.
As A Consumer, How Should I Actually Use The "Maverick" Mark When Choosing Who To Work With?
Look for it being visible, not just claimed. A genuine Maverick should have the status clearly displayed — on their email signature, their window card, their letterhead etc. It's something they should be proud to point to, not something you have to dig for. Beyond the badge itself, look at how they think and operate. We're looking for professionals who know the rules of their own industry properly, precisely so they know when convention is getting in the way of doing right by a client — not breaking rules for the sake of it, but refusing to let box-ticking and process stand between a client and the outcome they actually need.
It's worth saying, too: this movement exists as much for the good professionals already out there as it does for consumers. Plenty of excellent agents and conveyancers fight an uphill battle every day, competing against — and getting tarred with the same brush as — the worst operators in their own profession. Giving the public a trusted yardstick they can actually rely on protects the good professionals just as much as it protects consumers from the bad ones.
Is There A Cap On Numbers, Or Will The Movement Keep Growing?
It will keep growing as more professionals meet the standard and commit to it — there's no ceiling we're working towards. What stops that growth turning into the kind of high-volume, fee-collecting membership the industry already has too much of is the annual renewal: status gets reviewed every year, not assumed, and it can be revoked immediately for a confirmed breach of conduct. Growth only works if it doesn't dilute the standard behind it, and that's the balance we're watching most closely as the order expands.
Next Steps
Now you have more of an understanding about what The Maverick Movement is and what it isn't, if you're a true property professional, you're no doubt feeling the pull of belonging to an elite order who are committed to a job done right.
If you're fed up with seeing your expertise undermined by bad actors, fed up with the challenges which hinder your clients moving home and you finally want to earn what you're worth, we invite you to complete our application at the following link: https://wiggywam.co.uk/pmapplication
We'll then be in touch to discuss next steps and arrange the interview if you meet the standard.