Are we measuring conveyancing performance in the wrong way? – Singh
There has been plenty of discussion about how we speed up the home buying and selling process.
However, a recent poll in Mortgage Solutions provides a useful reminder that some of the biggest causes of delay are not necessarily within the control of the conveyancer handling an individual transaction.
Half of brokers responding to the poll said broken transaction chains were the biggest cause of completion delays, comfortably ahead of the 18% who pointed to missing property information, while respondents also highlighted searches, enquiries, leasehold, management packs, anti-money laundering (AML) requirements and clients themselves among the factors that can slow progress.
This raises an important question about how we judge conveyancing performance, because there is a significant difference between how long a transaction takes to complete and how effectively the conveyancer has dealt with the work they can actually control.
When everybody is ready except somebody else
A colleague of mine is currently experiencing a perfect example of this, having sold her property and agreed the purchase of another, with her own transaction ready to proceed.
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However, she cannot move because somebody much further up the chain is due to have an eye operation at the end of this month and cannot complete until afterwards, which means everyone in her chain is having to wait a number of additional weeks before they can move.
When my colleague eventually completes, those extra weeks will simply be tallied as part of the total time it has taken to get from instruction to completion, even though there was absolutely nothing her conveyancer could have done to remove them.
This is hardly an unusual feature of the UK housing market, because most existing homeowners need the proceeds from one property to fund the purchase of another, which inevitably creates chains and dependencies between people who may otherwise have no connection with each other.
The longer the chain becomes, the greater the number of opportunities for something to cause a delay, whether that is a mortgage issue, a survey problem, outstanding enquiries, leasehold information, a lost buyer or simply somebody who is not yet able to move.
Reform can only go so far
I have said before that there is much to welcome in the work taking place to improve the home buying and selling process, and anything that removes unnecessary delays, provides information earlier or makes individual parts of a transaction work better should be supported.
However, we also need to be realistic about what those reforms can achieve, because no amount of digitalisation or upfront information will remove every problem created by what can be a large number of linked purchases and sales having to complete together.
We should absolutely be looking to remove avoidable delays, but that is very different from suggesting every transaction can be made significantly quicker if the conveyancer could only work faster.
This distinction also matters when advisers and clients assess whether they have received a good conveyancing service, because headline completion times alone do not necessarily tell us very much about where, or whether, a delay occurred or who was responsible for it.
Judge firms on what they can control
None of this means conveyancing firms should escape scrutiny when service falls short, and at Conveybuddy, we put considerable emphasis on actively managing our panel precisely because we believe firms should be held accountable for the service they provide.
However, that means looking beyond a simple measure of how many weeks a case took to complete and understanding whether the conveyancer progressed the work within their control, responded when required, communicated properly and made clear when something elsewhere was preventing progress.
If a case is sitting untouched when action could have been taken, that is a service issue that needs addressing, but if the conveyancer is ready and everyone is waiting for a problem three links further up the chain to be resolved, that is something entirely different.
For advisers, having that visibility matters because it allows them to understand what is actually happening with their client’s transaction and, importantly, explain it to the client rather than leaving them wondering why nothing appears to be moving.
The Mortgage Solutions poll suggests brokers already understand how significant chains are in determining completion times, and that should perhaps prompt a wider rethink about how we measure conveyancing performance.
We should judge conveyancers firmly on the things they can control, while recognising that even the best conveyancer in the country cannot control everybody else in the chain.
