Something struck me while reading the property and legal press recently. Estate agents are being asked to provide more information and carry greater responsibility for what appears in property listings. Conveyancers are facing increasing regulatory scrutiny, rising complaints and significant anti-money-laundering obligations. Mortgage brokers are dealing with a more reactive lending market in which products can change quickly and clients expect answers almost immediately.
None of those responsibilities is unreasonable. Consumers should receive accurate information. Money laundering and fraud need to be taken seriously. Professional standards should be high and communication should be better. But there is something we seem reluctant to talk about. We keep increasing the responsibilities placed on the people inside the transaction without properly fixing the transaction they are being asked to work in.
Everybody is being asked to do more
The Government's Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap gives estate agents a much bigger role in getting information right at the beginning of the process. It wants better Material Information, standardised ways of gathering it and ultimately comprehensive sales packs before a property is even listed. It is also proposing higher professional standards, including mandatory qualifications for estate agents. Again, I broadly agree with the direction.
The Government's own consultation illustrates the difficulty, though. When respondents were asked what prevented estate agents from providing better Material Information, the most commonly cited issue was a lack of expertise and reliance on other professionals. There were also concerns about where responsibility and liability should sit when information is collected and interpreted. In other words, we want agents to provide more information, but some of that information requires expertise they do not possess and should not pretend to possess.
At the same time, conveyancers are dealing with their own pressures. The Legal Ombudsman's latest annual figures show residential conveyancing accounted for 36% of all complaints it accepted in 2025/26 and was responsible for almost three-quarters of the increase in accepted complaints compared with the previous year. Poor communication and delay remain among the dominant themes. It would be easy to read that and conclude that conveyancers simply need to work faster and answer the telephone more often. I think that is far too simplistic.
The regulator has identified something much more interesting
The Solicitors Regulation Authority published its latest sectoral risk assessment this month. Conveyancing remains one of the legal services considered most vulnerable to money laundering, which will surprise nobody working in property.
But one observation particularly caught my attention. The SRA says that transactions involving multiple firms, professional advisers and service providers can reduce visibility over the broader transaction and make it more difficult for an individual firm to obtain a complete understanding of what is happening. Think about that for a moment. One of the regulators responsible for protecting the integrity of the legal system is effectively acknowledging that fragmentation itself can reduce visibility of risk.
That feels important, because our response to risk is usually to add another process. Another check. Another form. Another responsibility. Another piece of guidance telling one participant what they must do. Sometimes that is necessary, but if the underlying problem is that everybody only sees their own part of the transaction, continually adding responsibility without improving visibility starts to look like treating the symptoms rather than the disease. More accountability needs more visibility.
Mortgage brokers are experiencing the same transaction from another angle
Brokers have different responsibilities, but they are caught inside the same fragmented process. Mortgage Solutions recently described 2026 as a more reactive mortgage market, with brokers talking about volatile rates, shorter product shelf lives and the need to get information and documentation from clients quickly when circumstances change. Imagine doing that while having limited visibility of the transaction the mortgage exists to fund.
The broker may have done everything required. The application is submitted, the valuation completed and the mortgage offer issued. Yet somewhere else in the transaction a legal problem, missing document or chain delay may be quietly putting the move at risk. The mortgage offer can be perfectly healthy while the transaction underneath it is deteriorating. That is not a criticism of the broker. How are they supposed to know? And that is really the point.
Perhaps we are asking professionals to compensate for bad infrastructure
We talk constantly about making professionals more efficient. Agents should communicate better. Conveyancers should provide more updates. Brokers should chase more quickly. Sellers should provide more information and buyers should understand the process better. Perhaps we should also ask why we have made all of those things so unnecessarily difficult.
A seller asks the estate agent what is happening. The estate agent asks the conveyancer. The conveyancer may be waiting for the other side, the client, a search, a freeholder or a managing agent. The buyer asks their broker because they trust them, while the broker may know everything about the mortgage and very little about the outstanding legal issue. Every participant can be doing their job, yet the consumer experiences the whole thing as one badly coordinated process. That is because consumers do not experience estate agency, conveyancing and mortgage advice as separate industries. They experience 'moving home'.
We have built increasingly sophisticated technology around each profession while leaving the space between them surprisingly primitive. And then we wonder why everybody spends so much time chasing everybody else.
Better regulation cannot fix bad plumbing
There is a simple analogy here. If a house has leaking pipes, we can introduce ever stricter rules about how quickly everybody must mop the floor. We can measure the size of the puddles, introduce training for the people holding the buckets and penalise anybody who fails to mop quickly enough. Eventually somebody needs to fix the plumbing. That is how parts of property reform currently feel to me.
Better professional standards matter. Regulation matters. Consumer protection matters. But if we keep adding responsibility to a fundamentally fragmented transaction, we should not be surprised when professionals become overloaded and consumers continue to complain about delays and communication.
The Government itself increasingly appears to recognise this. Its roadmap talks about reducing duplication, enabling trusted information to be shared between professionals, making AML checks more reusable and creating a system in which buyers and sellers have greater visibility of their transaction. That direction makes sense, but what matters now is actually connecting it.
This is where WiggyWam fits
I increasingly think the simplest way to explain the Moving Hub is not as another piece of property software. It is plumbing.
The estate agents and conveyancer do not need us to replace their CRMs or legal case-management systems. The mortgage broker certainly does not need WiggyWam storing bank statements, payslips, affordability calculations and confidential financial advice. Those systems should remain where they belong. What needs connecting is the appropriate information about the transaction itself.
Has the solicitor been instructed? Has the mortgage application been submitted? Has the valuation taken place? Are documents outstanding? What stage has the transaction reached? Who currently has an action? Is another part of the chain creating a risk? That information does not replace professional judgement. It gives the appropriate people enough visibility to understand what is happening around the same move. The solicitor keeps the legal file. The broker keeps the financial file. The agent keeps the agency relationship. Each professional remains responsible for their own work. WiggyWam connects the transaction between them.
The same principle applies before the property is listed
This is also why the Seller's Pack matters. If agents are going to carry greater responsibility for upfront information, the answer cannot simply be to dump more legal and technical questions onto them. The seller needs help gathering information. The solicitor needs the opportunity to apply legal expertise where it is required. Searches and supporting documents need to be available earlier. If the seller does not understand something, they need guidance. If they genuinely do not know an answer, the system needs to expose that uncertainty rather than encourage a guess. That creates a very different relationship between technology and professional responsibility. The technology gathers, organises, connects and highlights. The professional interprets, advises and decides. That is how it should be.
This is bigger than WiggyWam
I don't believe one company should own the home-moving process, and I certainly don't think Government should simply choose a platform and impose it on everybody. What the industry needs is an infrastructure mindset.
We need reliable upfront information, common standards, and appropriate information to move between the people who legitimately need it. We need professional systems to remain professional systems while the transaction between them becomes more visible. And importantly, we need to stop treating independence and isolation as though they are the same thing. Solicitors, agents and mortgage brokers can remain completely professionally independent while participating in a connected transaction. Nobody needs to surrender their client, confidential information or judgement simply because everybody stops operating in the dark.
Perhaps we should fix the working environment before demanding even more from the people inside it
That is ultimately what bothers me about so much of the current debate. We keep asking professionals to do more, know more, check more, communicate more and carry more responsibility. Then we place them inside a transaction where information is fragmented across businesses, systems and inboxes and complain when the consumer cannot get a straight answer. Maybe the people inside home moving need higher standards. But perhaps the system needs higher standards too.
Because if we are going to make estate agents, conveyancers and mortgage professionals increasingly accountable for delivering a safer, faster and more transparent transaction, we also need to give them an environment in which that becomes possible. More regulation may improve individual behaviour. Better infrastructure can improve the transaction itself.
And after decades of concentrating on the people holding the buckets, perhaps it is finally time we fixed the plumbing.
Are we reinventing a wheel that is already turning?
There is one part of the reform debate I find increasingly difficult to understand. Government and influential industry groups continue talking about the future of home moving as though many of the solutions still need to be designed, yet some of those solutions already exist.
WiggyWam has already built around many of the pain points now being identified: earlier property information, Seller's Packs, Material Information, Smart Forms, supporting documents, upfront searches, earlier professional involvement, transaction milestones, shared visibility, communication tools, Property Workspaces and chain visibility. We were also publicly arguing for Seller's Packs and upfront searches back in 2021.
I am not claiming we have solved everything. National data standards, public-sector information, digital identity, regulation and legal reform need Government and industry-wide cooperation. But much of the operational problem has already been tackled. So why does so much of the conversation still start from a blank sheet of paper?
Rather than spending years designing another version of what may already exist, Government and industry should be actively looking for solutions, testing them in real transactions and comparing them against the problems they say need fixing. If they fail, discard them. If they work, use them.
Meanwhile, large corporate groups are not waiting for committees. They are building their own connected ecosystems now. Independents cannot afford for reform to move at committee speed while consolidation moves at market speed.
That is why I find the current debate so frustrating. The problem is no longer that nobody knows what needs fixing. We increasingly do know, some of the solutions are already built, and yet we are still behaving as though we are waiting for somebody to invent them.
Perhaps the question should simply be: What has already been built, and why aren't we using it?