UK Has One Of Slowest Housing Transaction Process

Analysis from Moverly revealed that it took an average of 179 days, or nearly six months, for a house sale in the UK to complete. 

For its research, Moverly compared the listing to completion timescales in the UK, US, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Australia, Canada, Singapore, Germany, France, New Zealand, and the UAE. 

It found that, altogether, the average time it took for a property to go through the entire sale process was 110 days – roughly three-and-a-half months. 

The UK has the longest timescale, and was followed by Italy, where Moverly found it took 159 days to complete a house sale. 

The length of completion was found to be 152 days – or five months – in Spain, Portugal and Singapore, followed by Germany with an average of 137 days, equating to four-and-a-half months. The fastest nation to complete a home sale was the US at 53 days, or nearly two months. 

Gemma Young, CEO of Moverly, said the slower housing transaction process was because of “unique idiosyncrasies causing bumps and obstacles that sellers and property professionals have to navigate throughout the selling journey” in the UK. 

She said many other countries had managed to fix these issues, including “archaic conveyancing practices to elongated windows in which buyers and sellers are legally allowed to change their minds and pull out of transactions”. 

Conveyancing is a definite culprit when it comes to delaying the selling process, and this is because too many of the legal processes that pave the way to exchange of contracts have remained unchanged for decades, if not longer.

By simply streamlining and digitising many of the conveyancing processes, we have proven that the time to sell can be reduced from up to 70%, which means the UK is perfectly capable of matching the speed of the US market.

As more and more agents and conveyancers adopt the tech solutions that are now widely available to them, we expect the UK’s performance to see radical improvement in a short period of time.