Speaking at an event talking about Santander’s Fixing the Broken Chain report, Angela Hesketh, head of market development for Pexa UK and board member of the Open Property Data Association (OPDA), said that having worked her whole life in the property industry – spending most of it in conveyancing – she had “seen that procedure go from what was a really trusted, very effective process” that took 4-8 weeks and had a “very positive relationship between the various different stakeholders” to it “deteriorating quite dramatically” over the past 25-30 years.
“We’re completely fragmented. There’s no interconnectivity, there’s a lot of blame, there’s a lot of fraud and there’s a lot of loss. For me, this is the key financial transaction for most people, and it could be such a positive emotional position, and yet they come out of it thinking: ‘I don’t want to do that ever, ever again’.
“For me, it’s about how do we… get that back? Not necessarily to where it was, but in a much more effective way for today’s society that delivers all of those things that you would expect around the major financial transaction of your life, and gives you a feel-good factor,” she said.
Hesketh added that the reason conveyancing was often singled out as the part in the home buying process where delays happen is that it is where “all of the information comes from”.
She explained: “They [conveyancers] are trying to pull information in all different formats from all different stakeholders at all different times, and usually having to duplicate a number of those steps as well.
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“For example, they can’t rely on the identification that another party has done on that property or that person and they can’t rely upon the source of funds or funding lines. That’s without even getting into the actual title itself, and the fact that they’ve got to be able to verify that, and even if information is given to them, they’ve got to go quite often back out to make sure that that correctly has come from the right place.”
Conveyancers are coming in at the ‘wrong time’ in home buying process
Another issue that Hesketh identified was that conveyancers were coming in at the “wrong time” in the home buying and selling process.
“By the time a conveyancer comes in, who is ultimately going to advise you on the title itself, you’ve already committed to that [property]. You’ve gone in, you’ve seen the property, you’ve thought that, ‘this is the most fantastic place, I need this, I’ve ordered all the white goods’. Then, oh no, this person [is] coming in and telling you about these problems.
“Those problems were always there. That property should not have been marketed for sale without knowing that issue, that may be a problem for one person and not [a] problem for another. At the end of the day, it doesn’t mean it’s a toxic property, it just means it doesn’t suit the person,” she explained.
Hesketh said the same goes for lenders and consumers as well, as they have “very limited information to be able to make either a decision to buy or a decision to lend”.
“It is only once that information is real that you can then actually make that secure lending decision, which is why we see the number [of] fallouts, because what they thought they were lending on is not absolutely reality,” she noted.
She said if conveyancing and the upfront information were brought forward in the process so you have “definitive information right at the beginning that doesn’t allow the seller to market that property until it’s a known entity”, that could avoid a lot of uncertainty.
“You get the conveyancers involved at the front end in the area that they understand, that they’re able to communicate that out to both lenders and consumers, and they can make… [a] much better-informed decision. It’s where it [conveyancing] is [in the process], as opposed to it being the problem. The problem is always there, they haven’t created it. It just hasn’t been unearthed until that point,” Hesketh said.
Upfront information could be ‘really important part’ of home buying reform
Victoria Latham, deputy director for housing at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, agreed that upfront information could be a “really important part” of home buying reform, which is why it was a key area cited in the launch of its home buying consultation.
“I know that we need that [upfront information] and I want that to be right. I’m looking for the consensus from all parties as to how that works, and then on the rest of the parts that we’re consulting on, genuinely, I’m looking for the myriad of people involved to tell us, so that we can honestly draw those opinions and perspectives together to determine which of those interventions are most needed,” she added.
When asked how the inclusion of upfront information would be different to home information packs, which were launched in 2007 as mandatory for anyone selling a home and then scrapped in 2010, Latham said there needs to be a focus on consumer understanding and “clarity of direction”.
“I’m really keen that we have something of a roadmap that says we’re here today, that’s where we’d like to get to… and being clear about the stages and giving people time to get there.
“If you try and do everything at once too quickly, it feels like too much of a knee-jerk shock, and all those people who are spending lots of time looking pictures and mentally thinking about schools and whether they’re going to live over there or nearer to family, it does too much to that vision of what they’re working towards.
“My thought… is it’s about not trying to do it too quickly, very much taking people on that transparency education journey, and a lot of that is things that were already out there, and colleagues and others are making changes to try and help people buy better, so to speak,” she added.
Latham noted that the implications of upfront information need to be clear, as “making changes is going to incur some costs for some people at some stages”.
“That’s not about it all falling on the seller or all falling on the buyer, or all falling on the lender, who has to make a new system, or all falling on the government, who has to create a platform. It’s acknowledging that to change something as fundamental and complex as the home buying and selling system, everyone’s going to have to move a bit, and if everyone moves a bit, it avoids everything falling on one party.
“That’s why I’m hoping that the consultation process [will give] the opportunity to put out some considered responses and [having] some conversations around it will warm the ground up,” she added.
