High Time for an Update?

High Time for an Update?

No, I’m not referring to your kitchen or bathroom, but the archaic process involved in buying or selling property in England and Wales.

It is possible to file your tax return online in an hour. It is possible to register or tax a car online in minutes. The same goes for TV licences, booking flights, and all manner of other chores. Google (other search engines are available!) will help you find out anything you want in seconds, whereas it wasn’t all that long ago you had to make trip down to the local library and spend a morning deep in books.

Yet, over the course of my career as an agent, I have seen the period between agreeing a sale and exchange of contracts seem to lengthen, rather than contract.

I can recall buying an apartment in my twenties with a large mortgage, yet exchanging contracts within 14 days of my offer being accepted. That would just not be possible today. Progress indeed!?

One of the main culprits seems to be the local authority searches that are required. As an example, in a certain borough of London last year, local searches were taking upwards of 6 weeks to come back! In Cornwall, they take between one and two weeks, which is not bad nationally, but in this day and age, to wait weeks for something just seems from another age doesn’t it? Generation Z are used to finding out anything in 10 seconds on their smartphone, so will they want to wait weeks for these searches.

This has to change, if nothing else to keep up with the rest of our lives. I’m sure a government with a healthy majority such as this could sort this out, and bring the transactional process of buying a house into the 21st Century, but will they? We are always being told that for the UK housing market to function properly we need stamp duty reform, more houses built, ‘Help To Buy’, and all manner of other such things, but it strikes me that solving these huge delays in the transactional process would be a big step.