Conveyancing Roundtable 2025

10 July, 2025

Below is the discussion in May 2025 of the evolution of conveyancing – the market for and the practice of conveyancing. You can read the CLC’s 2020 Discussion Paper and roundtables held since then here.

This was not the first time that the annual CLC Industry Roundtable had taken place soon after a stamp duty land tax deadline, but it was clear that this year’s (the rate changed on 1 April) went more smoothly than before.

Mark Montgomery, chief strategy officer at conveyancing giant Simplify, said it was “a combination of people having learnt the lessons from previous ones, having sufficient notice of it and preparing well”. But inevitably there was a late rush – the group completed 6,500 transactions in the last five days, when it had expected around 4,000.

Henry Hadlow, co founder of north London licensed conveyancing firm Juno, said the last week of March set a firm record for the number of transactions completed – only to be beaten on Monday 31 March alone – while Sam Jordan, chief operating officer at conveyancing software provider InfoTrack, said it saw consecutive record months for SDLT filings in March and AP1 submissions in April. Paul Saunders, managing director of both Optima Legal and high street conveyancing practice Amity Legal, part of Pexa, said the latter saw completions up 300% “but with few of the stresses that have appeared historically”.

Precedent set?
The question then is why, given ever-lengthening completion times, this level of activity is not the norm? Do lawyers just not work hard enough, wonder estate agents?

Not so, insisted Rob Gurney, a former licensed conveyancer who is now managing director of software company Ochresoft. The weeks leading up to the deadline saw the focus put firmly on those transactions that were sufficiently advanced that they could complete by 31 March. Come 1 April and attention returned to those less mature matters that now needed to be progressed. This meant the cases were simply not there to complete in April at the same volume.

“It is often overlooked that no one sets out to make a transaction slow,” pointed out Paul Saunders. “Everyone wants the best outcome for the client and no one gets paid unless it completes.”

Mark Montgomery said another factor was that, with the deadline approaching, buyers’ lawyers who had previously not been willing to take “a pragmatic view” on certain issues were suddenly prepared to. “If people took the same views in business as usual that they took in extremis, some of those delays would go away,” he said.

Sarah Sargent, head of residential property at Leeds-based solicitors’ firm Lupton Fawcett and a member of the Law Society Council, said she also wondered if this period would in time lead to negligence claims: “I have no doubt that there have been some people that took a bit of a risk on things because of the pressure they were under from the clients.”

For Epi Pearce, risk manager (property risk) at Nationwide Building Society, who oversees its legal panel, “there was some great conveyancing done on some of our transactions that really did show the art of the possible, but then on the other hand, we were getting certificate of titles before basic conveyancing activities happened to try and speed that along.

“That type of behaviour is not acceptable. If you are going to submit the certificate of title, it is not just because you want the stamp duty to be more favourable for your clients. It is because you are ready to transact and you are asking us for the money.”

Nationwide is now contacting all of those firms to understand why they did this, with the threat of removal from the panel.

Rob Houghton, CEO and founder of comparison website reallymoving, noted that fees went up 10% year-on-year, inflation-adjusted, during the peak of the stamp duty deadline. Indeed, he said there was “good evidence that changes in tax policy have a significant impact on conveyancing prices”.

The total cost of conveyancing – including legal fees, expenses and disbursements, measured from quotes on reallymoving – rose 29% between May 2020, just before the first stamp duty holiday was announced, and their peak in July 2021. Since then, they have increased a further 8%, but that’s over a period when inflation has been in total 23%, so in effect a 15% drop in real terms. “The latest stamp duty change had a far smaller impact, the total cost going up around 5%, so only 1-2% in real terms,” he went on.

“Overall, there’s pretty clear evidence that the net impact of the stamp duty reduction after Covid had a net negative impact on movers: although there was a saving of up to £15,000 in stamp duty, the 15% increase in property prices, or £39,000, triggered by the rush to buy, more than offset that tax reduction, leaving most movers worse off.”

Chase or be chased
Conveyancers are now back into ‘business as usual’ and so – according to Landmark research last year – spending up to half of the working day chasing others or being chased.

“To a certain extent, chasing is part and parcel of what our job is,” said Sarah Sargent. “The frustration comes when you are continually chasing but not getting a response.” Paul Saunders agreed: “Chasing is inevitable and arguably a necessary part of the process, but it needs to be an informed stage and one that adds value and not additional delay.”

Mark Montgomery made the distinction between chasing and being chased. “Doing the chasing is absolutely part of being proactive, but by pushing more information out digitally to the agents and clients, and being more transparent, you can really reduce the extent to which you are chased. You then have more time to do the processing.”

Angela Hesketh, head of market development at Pexa, suggested there was also “a mentality around chasing”. She explained: “Whether it is estate agents, or elsewhere in the chain, there are groups of people who are employed to do that job, so it creates this monster that is constantly chasing for information.”

There was arguably a divide between data-driven firms like Juno – “We only chase things that we see impact transaction times,” said Henry Hadlow – and those more traditional practices that are not.

There was a similar sentiment around additional enquiries. “The seller’s lawyer ought to know what the buyer’s lawyer needs in order to complete a transaction,” said Rob Gurney. “Every missing piece of information is an additional enquiry waiting to happen, and a delay because of that.

“The enquiries process is often misunderstood because we are not talking about the time wasted in typing up and replying to 10 things. As soon as you raise an enquiry, particularly an unnecessary one, you are creating a chance of a huge unnecessary delay. Lawyers do not just instantly reply the second they get an additional enquiry. It goes to the bottom of the pile because they are dealing with two weeks’ worth of enquiries ahead of that. Each round of lawyer-to-lawyer communication has the possibility of adding weeks to a transaction unnecessarily.”

Sam Jordan said that in developing an enquiries solution, Infotrack also found “great inconsistencies” in what enquiries different conveyancers deemed relevant. “Ultimately technology will be able to proactively manage a lot of these lower-level things. Identifying problems before they become one and responding to queries where the answer is simple and doesn’t require a legal mind.”

Material information in flux
This took us, inevitably, to the question of material upfront information – if all the key data is provided at the start, that the need for chasing and additional enquiries should shrink considerably.

Sally Holdway, director of technology consultancy Teal Legal and co-founder of the Home Owner’s Passport, said the profession was still navigating the contradictions between caveat emptor and upfront information. “Should I be sending out information about an enquiry that has not come in yet? That has to be the decision that each fee-earner makes on each file. We are in a change moment.”

It would help, of course, if sellers instructed their conveyancers from day one but it remains an uphill task to convince them. “We need the authority of the agent,” said Beth Rudolf, director of delivery at the Conveyancing Association and co-chair of the Home Buying and Selling Council, who pointed to the Simplify model, where the agent routinely advises the client to instruct a conveyancer when the property goes on the market.

The roundtable took place not long after National Trading Standards estate and letting agency team withdrew its material information guidance. This was a surprise to many, but not those who were switched on, because it was based on estate agents’ obligations under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, which have now been superseded and replaced by the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCC).

Beth Rudolf expressed her frustration that the media coverage of this implied that material information was being ditched in some way, when in fact the underlying requirements on agents have not changed – but they need interpreting now without the specific property-related guidance.

At the same time, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which polices the new regime, has far greater enforcement powers than National Trading Standards. “What we hope is that, if CMA does not, the industry will come together to produce an update on that guidance,” she said – but fundamentally the content would not be different to what came before.

“Removing the specific guidance actually raises the bar for estate agents,” said Sally Holdway. “The rules are absolutely there in the DMCC. It is very clear what you have to adhere to, but the challenge we have is the lack of visible enforcement, or clear guidelines. From a practical point of view, without those, there is a large swathe of estate agents who will take it as subjective.”

What was needed, participants agreed, was a couple of hefty fines from the CMA to focus minds.

But while uncertainty persists, the fear is that such momentum for MI as had been build up will dissipate. One way to counter this, said Beth Rudolf, would be to include it in the Law Society’s national conveyancing protocol. While this cannot influence estate agent behaviour, it heavily influences conveyancers.

Indeed, the answer, if you were starting with a clean sheet, is property logbooks – containing all relevant information about a property – but even if they were mandated on all sales, they would take a long time to wash through the system.

Steering the course
Might this be where the Digital Property Market Steering Group (DPMSG) comes in? Stephen Ward, director of strategy and external relations at the CLC, which is a member of the group, said: “The main task now for the DPMSG is to find the levers that will enable these changes to happen. We know what needs to be done; the challenge we have always had is that so many different professions and institutions need to move together to make the difference.”

Angela Hesketh, co chair of the DPMSG’s digital identity group as well as a board member for the Open Property Data Association, described the group as “a really exciting opportunity”. She explained: “It is the first time we have had all of those people and all of those organisations in one place. The challenge does seem too big at times, but that is why, within that group, there are three lines we have agreed to focus on.” These are the digital property information protocol, reusable digital identity, and trust and interoperability of data.

The DPMSG needs to create an environment for others to be successful, argued Sam Jordan. “Conveyancers’ aim is to help people move home as quickly and safely as possible. Beyond this, agents, lenders, government agencies and technology businesses should be aligned to help them.”

Reducing the need to do anti-money laundering checks to just once would on its own be a huge help and Neil Mullane, chief revenue officer at Thirdfort, said that despite all of its work – including accreditation by the Department of Science Innovation and Technology – “it is still a challenge to get everybody to trust what another party has done”. He added: “One problem is that there are so many parties with a commercial gain in the AML process that it prevents conveyancers being able to utilise and benefit from a shared ID. Quite often they are forced to use another supplier and put the client through the same process.”

The difficulty for lenders, said Eponine Pearce, is that if ID is only going to be checked once, it is likely to be done by the estate agent, who is unregulated.

Mike Harlow, deputy chief executive and director of customer strategy at HM Land Registry, pointed out that the government was working to help, such as through the newly passed Data (Use and Access) Act, which will regulate ID providers.

This was an example of how fear paralyses change. Sarah Sargent said: “We do not share ID because of the fear of the regulation and the penalties that we as law firms will face if something is not right. If I trusted what the agent down the road has provided and it turns out there is a problem with it, who is going to get hit on this? Fear is a big problem for us in the industry because of how heavily we are regulated.”

Beth Rudolf considered it “fear of the unknown” because the liability does not change at all. “The risk plummets with digital ID, and so you are not actually taking a risk. In Norway, frauds reduced by 1,000% when they introduced digital ID verification. Our AML regulations already say you can accept customer due diligence from a third party so long as they confirm that they are in compliance, and if you get audited you can access the data to prove it. That is how the digital ID providers work. We have the tick-boxes there. What we need to do now is embrace that. The reality is that if we stop the seller impersonation fraud, then everybody’s insurance premiums can go down.”

While reducing the number of times ID is checked would be good for the consumer if it does not compromise risk, Sam Jordan pointed out that digital ID checks take minutes, so reducing their frequency will not really impact transaction times. Similarly, digital client onboarding already exists. “The industry and the government need to focus and collaborate to solve the systemic problems that are actually causing long transaction times,” he said.

This led the discussion on to handling client monies. Umberto D’Anna, senior legal counsel at third-party managed account (TPMA) provider Shieldpay highlighted the importance of reducing risk for conveyancers and ensuring payment certainty – particularly in high-pressure scenarios such as the SDLT deadline. He acknowledged that “a cultural shift” was needed for the profession to embrace TPMAs as a viable alternative to traditional client accounts – with Shieldpay committed to educating the sector of the benefits.

Performance improvement
Last year’s roundtable saw Mr Harlow outline how HMLR was addressing performance issues. A year on and he described progress as “good, with some way still to go”. He explained: “Previously, some applications, particularly of certain types, were taking too long to process. We set a goal that, by March 2025, we would be processing 95% of applications within 12 months of their submission, down from almost 18 months. We surpassed that goal, which reflects the impact of working more closely with customers and our sustained investment in our people, technology and processes.

“But speed of service is still our top priority. We are outputting significantly more each month than we are getting in, even when there is a stamp duty land tax sprint going on. We know that if things carry on as they are, we will get back to normal speed of service.”

The next step is to work out what ‘normal’ should actually mean. “Previously, we had a speed of service that related to the type of application, not what the customer really needed. We would do some things in five days, because we could, and we used to do some of the other things in 25 days, because they took a bit longer. What we want to do is talk to the market about how we could set a speed of service expectation appropriate to their clients’ needs.”

He talked too about the progress being made with qualified electronic signatures (QESs). The government is keen on this and HMLR has tested the latest version. “They are super simple for the consumer to use and more secure for everyone. There are fewer things to go wrong and more certainty as to who signed what.” The DPMSG could play a major role in promoting their use, he continued. “With a little more testing, we should shortly be saying the door is open to a QES on any deed in any transaction at any time.”

To really make this fly, said Sarah Sargent, you would need electronic signatures for mortgage deeds. Epi Pearce said the major lenders are working on standardising the mortgage deed and “then we will be helping with the communication on QES to bring it out into the market. We are very much waving the QES flag”.

Common purpose
Mike Harlow referred to the experience of Norway, the poster child for a reformed, streamlined property transfer system. “If you talk to people in Norway about why it is better and faster, they do not say, ‘It is because our law is better’, or ‘It is because our information is better’. They say the root of it was everybody realising that the system only improved if everyone agreed that it should, that it could, what it looked like and played their part in doing it.”

But how realistic is this in England and Wales? Beth Rudolf has her doubts. “Everybody has a vested interest,” she pointed out, as shown by the debate over digital ID. “He wants to charge for his digital ID and they want to charge for theirs, so maybe we will need some mandation, but it is going to take forever to get a law through.

“We already have the primary legislation there with HIPs, so perhaps we should all just be lobbying to update the home information packs. They were never taken off the statute book. They were only suspended. Until estate agents are regulated, how can we be in lockstep?”

But the CMA offered hope, she said. “The moment we see the big fines coming down, the agents are on board. I’m confident the CMA will start by asking for undertakings from agents to comply and, if they do not comply, then they will be fined. That’s what they did with the new-build developers and the mis-selling of leasehold properties. Plus, of course, we are seeing those agents who do comply consistently increasing their pipeline turn, reducing time to exchange and reducing fall throughs.”

It is “the best of times and the worst of times at the moment”, said Sally Holdway. “We have all of these amazing pockets of digitisation, demonstrating all of the tangible benefits they have on transaction outcomes, but we are not going to be in lockstep unless we have either new legislation, or we have enforcement of what is there already. Enforcement is obviously the much faster opportunity.”

“It can feel frustrating at times, but to me it definitely feels as if we are moving in the right direction,” said Angela Hesketh. “We just have to keep an eye on not leaving anyone behind and not taking a pivot in completely the wrong direction at some point.”

Lenders, said Epi Pearce, have a lot on their plate, from climate change to regular rate adjustments. “I am not just talking about Nationwide, but if you talk to Lloyds, Santander or whoever, we are doing a lot of innovation about the process, whether it is e-COTs [certificate of title], e-offers, that side of the process, and how we work with Lender Exchange and LMS.

“It is about prioritisation. We are working through it all and hopefully as time goes on we will be in a position to absorb more of this.”

She highlighted too a recent announcement by Nationwide and Rightmove to pull in the MI from the site to provide real-time information about the likelihood of getting a mortgage on a home before even viewing it. “That is the biggest step forward that we have had in a while.”

Stephen Ward concluded: “I remain optimistic. The vision that Epi painted of absorbing that material information from the Rightmove portal and doing some decisioning on it is an example of the prizes that are scattered across the process that are there for the taking now.

“I think the DPMSG is our best hope, but we need some real unity there so that we are all singing from the same hymn sheet. We need some kind of campaign to ensure that the people who are delivering this on the ground, whether it is the estate agents, the conveyancers, the mortgage brokers, or the staff at the lenders, understand the benefits of this change for them and their clients.”

There is, of course, a bigger picture here. “The client is not being served as well as they should be by the process. UK plc is not being served either. At DPMSG, we have the opportunity to make this happen. We need to mobilise all of those people on the ground so that they understand that and take away the fear there.

“I think it can be done without legislation, because the imperative is there in business terms for conveyancers, and in moral and practical terms for the nation’s interests.

“Every institution engaged has to genuinely want to make the change. There will be winners and losers. Wherever there are vested interests, whenever something changes there will be losers. That is what we have to get past.”

Ends