The Solutions Already Exist. So Why Is Nobody Talking About Them?

A new survey tells us exactly what consumers are demanding from the home buying and selling process. The problem is, the solutions have already been built, yet the industry chooses to look the other way.

A survey published this week by the Open Property Data Association makes for compelling reading — not because it tells us anything particularly new, but because of what the industry intends to do with it.

Over 5,000 people who bought or sold a property in the past five years were asked about their experience. The results paint a familiar picture of a painful process that is slow, fragmented, duplicative, and deeply frustrating:

• 77.8% believe the home buying and selling process in England and Wales requires fundamental reform
• 43% said chasing updates and waiting for responses was the primary cause of delays
• 64% had to provide the same information two or three times during a transaction
• 18% had to provide that same information four or five times
• 58% had experienced a transaction fall through after an offer had been accepted — losing an average of three months in the process
• 1 in 10 transactions took more than six months to complete

These are damning statistics. They represent real families, real money, and real lives put on hold by a system that the overwhelming majority of its users recognise as no longer fit for purpose.

The OPDA's chair, Maria Harris, said that consumers "aren't just frustrated — they know what the solution looks like." She called for upfront information, reduced duplication, and digital transformation of the property data ecosystem.

On that analysis, she is absolutely right.

But here is the problem: the solution she describes already exists. It has been built. It is operational. Yet despite the desperate cries from consumers demanding the system is reformed, these active solutions are being met with near-total silence from the very industry bodies and media outlets that are this week treating the OPDA's survey as a revelation.

When The Survey Points Conveniently Toward The Surveyor's Solution

Before we go further, it is worth pausing on something that deserves more scrutiny than it is currently receiving.

This survey was conducted by the Open Property Data Association — an organisation that is itself actively developing a framework for digital property data sharing. The questions, and the conclusions drawn from them, point with remarkable consistency toward the specific type of solution that OPDA is working on...

That does not automatically invalidate the findings. The underlying consumer frustrations are real and well-documented by many independent sources. But when a body funds and publishes research that systematically supports its own agenda, it is reasonable to ask whether the framing of the questions was designed to reach a predetermined destination.

The property industry has a long history of surveys that tell us what their commissioners needed them to say. We should look at this one with the same critical eye we would apply to any other.

The Clique Problem

Here is what the OPDA article does not mention, and its something no journalist has chosen to explore.

The digital infrastructure required to deliver upfront property information, reduce duplication, and accelerate transactions is not theoretical. It does not need to be built. It has already been built — by professionals who decided, years ago, to stop waiting for industry bodies to move and to construct the solution themselves.

The WiggyWam platform is this infrastructure that consumers are demanding. It is operational. It directly addresses the pain points highlighted by the OPDA survey. Yet this solution is not receiving any column inches within Estate Agent Today. It is not being held up by OPDA, LMS, or Connells as evidence of what the market can already deliver. It is not being championed by the trade bodies who are this week nodding along to the survey data.

It is reasonable in this instance to ask why?

The answer, of course, is that it was not built by the approved clique that exists within the property industry.

Populist property commentator Chris Arnold put it plainly in the comments beneath the OPDA article itself:

"And yet the industry resists or ignores solutions that would immediately improve the process. Silas J Lees and Christine Soltvedt have built something extraordinary over the years that is the key to improved performance. But since it hasn't been developed by the accepted tech developers and their supporters, it gets little traction. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

That is not a fringe view. That is a respected industry voice, commenting publicly, on the very article being used this week to call for solutions — pointing out that the solution already exists and is being ignored. It has not made the headlines. It has not prompted a follow-up piece. It sits in the comments section, beneath an article that will be used to justify further investment in frameworks that duplicate what has already been built.

The British property industry — like many mature industries — operates a largely invisible but highly effective gatekeeping system. Access to media platforms, conference stages, and industry partnerships is not primarily determined by the quality or credibility of a solution. It is determined by relationships, by membership of the right bodies, by proximity to the right people, and on the implicit understanding that your solution will not disrupt the revenue streams of those doing the gatekeeping.

The WiggyWam platform, combined with The Maverick Movement disrupts those revenue streams.

Specifically, it offers estate agents and conveyancers a genuinely profitable business model that does not depend on referral fees — the same referral fees that are currently extracting an estimated £400 million a year from the conveyancing profession whilst ensuring the practitioners who do the actual legal work are paid a fraction of what their expertise is worth.

That is why these solutions are not getting the airtime they deserve. Not because they don't work. But rather because they work too well against the interests of the wrong people.

Why OPDA, LMS, & Connells Will Struggle To Deliver What They're Promising

Let's give the OPDA framework and the broader digital property data movement the benefit of the doubt for a moment and examine why, despite genuine effort and significant investment, these initiatives have struggled to gain meaningful traction.

The answer is not primarily technical. The technology for digital property packs, upfront data sharing, and standardised information flows is mature and available. The barrier is the business model.

The current housing transaction ecosystem is built around a set of financial incentives that actively resist efficiency. Referral fees create a system where conveyancing work is allocated not to the most capable firm, but to the firm willing to pay most to secure it. Volume conveyancing factories — firms that have industrialised the processing of transactions at the lowest possible unit cost — exist because the referral fee model makes high-volume, low-margin processing the only viable route to profitability for many firms.

When you push more transactions through a digital front end without addressing the underlying business model, you do not solve the problem. You relocate it. The digital property pack arrives faster, the information is shared earlier, and then the transaction lands in the queue at a volume conveyancing firm staffed by inexperienced practitioners working under impossible pressure — and the timeline collapses at exactly the same point it always did, just further down the line.

This is the fundamental flaw in the vision of reform currently being sold by the mainstream: it is a technology solution to what is primarily an economic and structural problem. And without confronting the referral fee model, without building a framework that makes quality conveyancing genuinely financially viable, the impressive survey statistics will not translate into the consumer outcomes being promised. In fact, it is highly likely to result in the opposite.

The 64% Problem Is Not A Data Problem

Look again at that statistic: 64% of consumers had to provide the same information two or three times during a transaction.

The OPDA frames this as a data sharing problem — consumers are having to repeat themselves because information is not flowing digitally between parties. Solve the data sharing, they argue, and you solve the duplication.

That analysis is partially correct. But it misses a significant part of the picture.

A substantial proportion of information duplication in property transactions occurs not because the data cannot flow, but because the practitioners requesting it lack the training, the experience, or the supervision to identify what they already have or what they actually need. Inexperienced conveyancers, working at volume in under-resourced firms, request everything — repeatedly — because they lack the professional judgement to work efficiently with what is already in front of them.

No digital property pack solves that. You can put the most comprehensive upfront information pack ever assembled in front of an under-supervised junior practitioner and they will still ask for it again in six weeks because they have not been trained to use what they have.

The solution to that problem is then not more technology. It is higher standards, better training, proper supervision, and a business model that makes investing in professional development economically rational for conveyancing firms — rather than an unaffordable luxury in a race-to-the-bottom pricing environment.

This is exactly what The Maverick Movement was built to address. Not as an abstract aspiration, but as a practical, operational framework for raising standards in estate agency, conveyancing, and mortgage brokering — with the infrastructure and business model built around it to support it.

What 85% Confidence Actually Tells Us

One more figure from the OPDA survey deserves attention: 85% of respondents said they are confident the home buying process will improve over the next five years.

This is being reported as an encouraging sign of consumer optimism.

It is worth considering an alternative interpretation.

Eighty-five percent of people who have just been through a twenty-week transaction nightmare, who lost three months of their lives when a purchase fell through, who provided the same information five times and still waited six months for completion — 85% of those people believe things will get better.

That is not a picture of confidence which the industry's tries to paint. That is evidence of the last cries of human hope in the absence of any credible alternative being presented to them. Those consumers do not know that the solution has already been built. They have not been told, because the media platforms that reach them are deliberately choosing not to cover it. 

That 85% represents an enormous opportunity and a profound responsibility. These are people who want to believe change is coming. The question is whether they will be told the truth about where that change is actually available — or whether they will continue to be pointed, survey by survey, press release by press release, toward proposed solutions that protect the status quo while appearing to challenge it.

The Question The Industry Needs To Answer

If the consumer demand for digital, upfront, transparent, efficient property transactions is as overwhelming as the OPDA survey suggests — and we have no reason to doubt that it is — then the conversation the industry needs to be having is not what needs to be built.

It is why what has already been built is being systematically ignored?

That is a question about power. About who controls the narrative in the British property industry. About which solutions get championed and which get quietly sidelined, and whose financial interests are served by that distinction.

It is, in short, the same question that runs through every aspect of the current housing market dysfunction — and the same question that the trade bodies, the associations, and the approved clique of industry commentators have shown, consistently and repeatedly, that they have no intention of ever answering honestly.

The consumers have spoken. The data is clear. The solutions exist.

The only thing standing between those consumers and a functioning housing market is the industry's willingness to let it through.

And as the industry appears incapable, or unwilling to do so, and the evidence continues to mount regarding the harm being caused to consumers as a result, we must all take steps ourselves to lead the reform necessary within the British housing market.

If you are an estate agent, conveyancer, or mortgage broker who recognises this pattern and is ready to be part of the solution rather than a participant in the problem, The Maverick Movement was built for you. It exists because the best professionals in this industry deserve a home that actually represents them — and because the families navigating this broken system deserve better than being used as survey statistics while the clique decides who gets to solve the problem. Click the following link to apply for your place on The Maverick Movement waitlist today. 

https://wiggywam.co.uk/pmapplication