The listing-to-completion timeline for housing transactions in the UK is the slowest of 12 global nations, a property information firm has found.
It takes an average of 179 days, or nearly six months, for a house sale in the UK to complete, according to analysis from Moverly.
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.
Sluggish conveyancing and uncertainty plaguing home sales
Gemma Young, CEO of Moverly, said the slower home sale 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”.
Young added: “It seems you have to move halfway around the world to access a decent home selling process. The Americans are showing the rest of the world up, while the UK is making everyone else look very good. That’s not to say the US model is better, but it’s certainly much faster and we should be doing everything we can to speed up what has become a painfully sluggish journey here in the UK.
“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.”
Moverly is a member of the Open Property Data Association (OPDA), an organisation that advocates for the use and sharing of digital property information to speed up the transaction process. The firm is also involved in a pilot scheme from LMS to provide digital sale-ready property information, which is available when a property is listed.
This article is based on one that was first published on YourMoney.com‘s sister site, Mortgage Solutions. Read: UK has ‘slowest’ housing transaction process, research finds