There is something increasingly strange about the way we sell homes in Britain. An estate agent wins the instruction, arranges the photographs, prepares the particulars, launches the property onto the portals, generates enquiries, conducts viewings, negotiates an offer and eventually gets the seller to that moment everyone has been working towards: Sold STC. It feels like progress, and of course it is, but it is also often the point at which we finally begin discovering whether the property is actually ready to complete a sale.
Only then does much of the serious transaction work really get underway. The solicitor becomes fully involved, forms are completed, searches are ordered, leasehold information is chased, alterations emerge, building regulation questions appear, boundaries are questioned, the survey identifies something unexpected or the lender raises an issue nobody had previously considered. Weeks into the transaction, everybody starts discovering things about the property that existed long before the first photograph was taken or the first buyer walked through the door. Perhaps we have simply been doing too much of this in the wrong order.
The industry is beginning to change
That is why Landmark Information Group's launch of RICS-standard pre-sale surveys is more interesting than it might initially appear. The surveys are designed to be completed earlier and included within sales packs, allowing visible defects, maintenance concerns and areas requiring further investigation to be identified before a buyer has committed significant time, money and emotion to the transaction.
The important story here isn't really the arrival of another type of survey. It is the change in thinking behind it. Instead of accepting that we investigate the property once somebody agrees to buy it, we begin understanding the property before asking somebody to commit to buying it. When you put it like that, it starts to sound remarkably obvious.
TwentyCi data cited alongside the launch suggests that 23.7% of property sales currently fail to complete, with late information contributing to further enquiries, renegotiations, delays and sometimes the collapse of transactions altogether. Not every fall-through can be prevented, of course. People's circumstances change, relationships break down, mortgage applications fail and buyers simply change their minds. But there is a considerable difference between an unavoidable fall-through and a transaction collapsing because something that could have been discovered before marketing only appeared eight weeks after the offer. That is the distinction the industry should be concentrating on.
Finding the buyer should become the middle of the transaction
For decades, estate agency has understandably been built around finding the buyer. Win the instruction, market the property, conduct the viewings and get the offer. Much of everything else follows afterwards, because the accepted offer has traditionally acted as the starting gun for the wider transaction.
Government reform is now moving decisively in another direction. The Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap points towards more comprehensive upfront information, earlier professional involvement, digital sales packs, better property information and ultimately a transaction in which buyers know considerably more before committing themselves.
The reason is not difficult to understand. Government figures put the average period between an accepted offer and completion at around 120 days, while roughly one transaction in three fails. Those failed transactions cost consumers hundreds of millions of pounds each year, before we even consider the enormous amount of professional time, duplicated work and emotional energy wasted along the way.
We can argue about exactly what belongs in a sales pack, who should prepare it and what should eventually become mandatory, but the underlying principle is becoming difficult to dispute. Finding a buyer should not be the moment a seller starts preparing to sell their property. Increasingly, the property should already be prepared for the buyer before they arrive. That changes the entire sequence.
What if we prepared the transaction before marketing it?
Imagine a seller decides they want to move and, instead of immediately racing to get the property online, the first few days are also used to prepare the transaction behind the listing. The seller begins completing the important property information, their solicitor is instructed earlier, title information can be examined, leasehold documentation can begin being gathered, material information is established and the relevant documents start being assembled.
Where appropriate, information about the physical condition of the property can increasingly be prepared earlier too. If there is an obvious problem that is likely to concern a buyer, lender or solicitor later, perhaps the best time to discover it is before everybody has built a transaction around the assumption that it doesn't exist.
None of this means delaying marketing for months while every possible question is answered. That would simply create a different problem. It means using the period in which the agent is already preparing the property for market to prepare the transaction as well.
The photographs can still be taken, the particulars written and the marketing launched, but the agent is no longer simply bringing another house to market. They are increasingly bringing a transaction-ready property to market.
That creates a very different proposition for the buyer. Instead of effectively saying, “Make an offer and then we'll start finding everything out”, we can begin saying, “Here is the property, here is what we already know about it, and now you can make a much better-informed decision about whether it is right for you.” Better information does not guarantee that a buyer will proceed, but it should mean that the offer they make is based on considerably fewer unknowns.
Perhaps we need a different measure of a good estate agent
There is also a commercial argument here that I think estate agents should take seriously. Estate agency has traditionally measured performance through instructions, listings, viewings, offers and Sold STC. Those figures matter because they tell us whether an agency is successfully winning business and finding buyers, but perhaps there is another number we should become far more interested in: how many of those Sold STCs actually become completions? Sold STC does not give the seller their money, it does not give the buyer their keys and, under most traditional estate agency models, it does not pay the agent their fee either. Completion does.
An estate agent can spend hundreds or even thousands of pounds winning and marketing an instruction, invest weeks conducting viewings and negotiating an offer, and then effectively hand the future commission over to a fragmented transaction process and hope it eventually emerges intact at the other end.
That has never made much commercial sense, but it becomes even harder to justify when transaction volumes are under pressure and buyers are more cautious. When there are fewer transactions available, every good buyer becomes more valuable and every avoidable fall-through becomes more expensive.
Perhaps the best agents of the future will therefore be judged not simply by how quickly they can get a property under offer, but by how effectively they prepared that property to stay under offer all the way to completion.
Estate agents don't need to become solicitors
This is where I think there is sometimes unnecessary resistance to upfront information and earlier transaction preparation. Preparing a property properly does not mean asking estate agents to become conveyancers, surveyors, mortgage brokers or lawyers. In fact, it should mean precisely the opposite: bringing the right professionals into the transaction earlier and allowing each of them to do their own job at the point where it can make the greatest difference.
If there is a legal issue, involve the solicitor. If there is a question about condition, involve the surveyor. If finance needs to be understood, involve the broker. The estate agent's role does not need to expand into everybody else's profession; it can evolve into something much more valuable, which is coordinating a properly prepared home move.
That philosophy sits very naturally with what we mean by the Maverick Movement. A Property Maverick should not simply be asking how quickly a property can be listed or how impressive the marketing looks. They should also be asking what could prevent this property completing once a buyer has been found, and what can reasonably be done about it now rather than eight weeks from now. That is a very different approach to estate agency because the objective becomes the outcome rather than simply the activity.
It is also why we built the Seller's Pack the way we did
This same principle sits behind what we have been building at WiggyWam. The Seller's Pack is intended to begin before the buyer arrives, allowing the seller to start completing property information, gathering relevant documents and preparing the transaction while the property itself is being prepared and marketed. The solicitor can be brought into the process earlier rather than everybody waiting for an accepted offer before beginning work that could already have been underway.
The purpose is not to create another digital pile of paperwork. It is to identify as many avoidable problems as possible while they are still relatively easy to deal with, rather than discovering them once a buyer, seller, agent, solicitor and mortgage broker are all financially and emotionally invested in keeping the transaction alive.
Once the buyer does arrive, the problem changes. Preparation becomes progression, and that is where the Moving Hub and Property Workspace become important. The seller, buyer, estate agent, solicitors, mortgage broker and other invited professionals can work around the same transaction through their own dashboards and private workspace, with greater visibility of tasks, milestones, appropriate documents, communication and what still needs to happen.
That is why I keep coming back to a very simple distinction. The Seller's Pack makes the property ready, while the Moving Hub keeps the transaction moving. They are two parts of the same problem because there is little point preparing a transaction brilliantly and then allowing it to disappear into the same fragmented process once a buyer has been found.
We don't need to wait for Government to tell us to do it
The Government's reforms will inevitably take time. There will be consultations, technical standards, legislation and plenty of debate about what should become mandatory and what should remain voluntary. That is perfectly normal when changing a system involving lenders, conveyancers, estate agents, surveyors, technology providers and millions of consumers.
But we already know the broad direction of travel, and today's developments are another sign that parts of the industry are beginning to move before legislation forces them to.
We do not need legislation before encouraging sellers to instruct their solicitor earlier. We do not need legislation before gathering useful property information sooner. We do not need legislation before identifying obvious transaction risks before a buyer arrives, and we certainly do not need legislation before improving communication and visibility once a sale has been agreed.
What is really required is a change in mindset about where the home-moving transaction begins. For years we have treated Sold STC as the great achievement in estate agency. The board changes, the portal listing changes and everyone quite rightly celebrates finding the buyer. But perhaps Sold STC should increasingly be viewed as something different. It is not the finish line and, if we prepare properties properly, it should not really be the starting line either.
It should simply be the moment when a well-prepared property meets a well-informed buyer and the next stage of an already-prepared transaction begins. Because finding the buyer was never really the objective. Getting them home was.