In this latest opinion piece I take on the question of the conveyancing process and suggest one way that it might be dragged out of the 16th Century and at least into the 20th.

There was a time, back in the 1970’s, that to book a holiday was to run the gauntlet. Hotel, flights, transfers – were all cobbled together separately by a travel agent from a smoky office and the resulting deal was a fragmented one necessitating that the provider of each part of your trip dealt with you separately. There was nothing joined up about it.

The subsequent solution to travel uncertainty and consumer angst was the package holiday and which was eventually accompanied by appropriate legislation to ensure that travellers were protected. The aptly named Package Travel Regulations bound the entire vacation together and made it incumbent upon the tour operator to take responsibility for the whole trip.

This might sound familiar to us property types as it’s rather reminiscent of the home moving process as a hotchpotch of cats to herd, bucks that are passed and tempers frayed. A mish-mash of loose ends and uncoordinated entities – think ‘supply teacher trying to manage an unruly class of 5 year olds all high on pop-tarts’.

Getting a residential property sale through is a battle. The agents in each chain, the conveyancers, mortgage lenders and the respective buyers and sellers all want essentially the same thing, but the process is nonetheless a fight.

The most recent data from GetAgent.co.uk says that it takes 144 days to progress a property from listing to completion and this time has increased by 14% in just the last year alone. And these are pre-Covid stats.

One wonders what conveyancers actually do during their typical day? And how that’s changed at all since the revolution of email. Or the telephone.

Because in deference to such technological progress, property lawyers oversee a process that whilst it has always been slow and frustrating and done on a piece-meal, disjointed and consecutive basis, is now slowing to a point that, soon, it will take less time to meet someone, marry them and have a family than it does to buy the house for them to actually live in.

Conveyancing seems a bit like playing pass the parcel in the dark. With drunk people. And with one hand tied behind one’s back. In other words, lots of good intentions but much shouting and arguing too and with little progress made.

The consequence of the procedure being so lethargic is that the parties involved become frustrated. The important people, those that are actually seeking to move home, become stressed and angry. Their agents, desperate for a positive outcome due to the ‘all or nothing’ financial implications, nag, chase, cajole and battle to drag each transaction along from the sidelines – often falling out with the lawyers and the clients too along the way.

For a bunch of elements that all have the same destination in common, it’s understandably felt that agent and client stand united against the obstacle of the conveyancer and their inability to get stuff done, or even to respond. A ridiculous dichotomy – enemies with a common goal.

It’s of some hindrance that the legal side of selling and buying a home still stems from when Henry VIII decided that he needed a wife for every new season. In filling his Hampton Court four-poster with successive conquests he was compelled to extract himself from the straight-up morals of the Catholic Church (yes I know, hilarious irony) and start an alternative which in turn meant getting rid of the monasteries. To do this necessitated a new legal process and so conveyancing was born.

Of course, modern day conveyancing has not progressed much since then and I hear that some of the industry’s traditionalists continue to use quill pens and wax seals.

So now that I have roundly mocked the sloth like nature of property law and struck myself from the Conveyancing Association’s Christmas Party list, what is the solution to the logjam? Or, perhaps at least part of the solution?

Well, waiting for intervention by government with new legislation is pointless. They had other bigger priorities even before Covid-19 and Brexit and so now, as these generational distractions are focussed upon for a while yet, it’s somewhat unlikely that speeding up the sale of detached houses in Aylesbury will be high on Boris’s list of parliamentary priorities. This despite the best intentions of the Home Buying and Selling Group and which I myself sit on.

No, what’s required is to take the thing by the scruff of the neck and to force it to behave. If you now have an image in your head of a stubborn puppy that needs to be schooled and disciplined, hold that thought.

The only way, in the absence of anything legislative forthcoming, is for the party that already does much of the running and problem solving and progression in each transaction to take the reins. The one which actually communicates with the consumer mostly.

Yes, estate agents should take over the conveyancing process ‘as one’. List the home, find a buyer, coordinate the conveyance, liaise, exchange and complete, all under one roof. The epitome of the one-stop-shop cliché. But it’s a cliché for a reason and that’s because one -stop-shops have merit. So say Mr Sainsbury, Mr Marks and Mr Spencer.

If we revisit the opening to this article, I used the travel industry as an example of disparate pieces being tamed together as a package. Why should buying or selling a house be any different? It’s a rather more important and costly experience than taking a week in Magaluf and therefore deserves at least a similar or better level of co-ordinated care and oversight, I reckon.

Ultimately, sellers and buyers could not give a stuff about which conveyancer they use. Each one is unlikely to have Ocado like loyalty – because all that the consumer wants is a smooth, swift and certain sale and, one would venture, the smallest number of touch points and communication obstacles as possible.

I even understand that this is the way that things are done in Scotland and whom clearly emerged from the middle ages more adeptly than we may have thought. North of the border it’s the lawyers that swallowed agents. Yet here I suggest, purely because I’m biased, that the agent becomes principal.

So called ‘Tesco Law’ namely the Legal Services Act allows non-lawyers to own law firms. Some estate agency businesses in England own conveyancers – famously bad ones in my experience (and yours probably) include Countrywide Property Lawyers for instance. Yet, for those of you at the back that are slow, I am not talking about separation here but rather amalgamation.

A conveyancer IN the estate agency business. Part and parcel. Belt and braces. End to end. Can you just imagine the reduction in telephone tag that you would play from there on?

To the consumer, engaging an estate agent should include the legal process too – still regulated of course. We should own it. After all, our clients think we own the whole journey anyway.

Faster transactions. Lower fall through rate. Happier customers.

I can think of over one million reasons each year to do as I am suggesting – but none not to.

Or you could all just carry on like it’s 1979. Or 1579 in fact.