Home-moving reform
Home buying and selling reform roadmap reaction
Kotini looks at what the government’s June 2026 reform roadmap means for estate agents, and why the industry may need to rethink what success really looks like.
25th June 2026 | Kotini
The big shift
Old mindset: celebrate when the instruction is signed.
New mindset: treat instruction as the starting line for preparation.
Future focus: digital property packs, identity checks, AML verification and conveyancer instruction before the property goes live.
Getting a signed contract has long been the moment estate agents celebrate.
But the government’s home buying and selling reform roadmap, published in June 2026, makes a compelling case that this is the wrong finish line.
If a transaction takes an average of 120 days to complete after offer acceptance, and that is 60% longer than it took in 2007, something in the process is not working. The reforms are designed to fix it.
The question for your agency is: are you ready to shift how you think about what success looks like?
The problem is not just the data. It is the mindset.
Most people working in estate agency know the process is slow. What is harder to admit is that the industry has, in many cases, designed itself around managing that slowness rather than solving it.
“We’ve normalised a process that isn’t actually very good. I think you just have to take a moment to really understand that. We’ve been doing this for years and decades, and it is just a really bad process.”
Alice Bullard, CEO, Nested
The statistics back this up. OPDA’s consumer research found that two thirds of people said they were so put off by their experience of moving home that they were not planning to move again.
That is not just bad for consumers. It actively reduces the supply of properties coming to market. The people who should be downsizing stay put. Families who want to upsize cannot find what they need. The whole market slows.
The reform roadmap has strong industry support:
- More than 1,100 consultation responses
- 82% of respondents supported the overall objectives
- Most individual proposals received 70–86% approval
The direction of travel is mandatory. The question is whether agencies want to get there early or be pushed there later.
What the reforms actually require
The roadmap covers several interconnected areas: mandatory upfront sales packs, a code of practice for estate agents, qualification requirements, binding conditional contracts and material information guidance that will apply across the entire transaction chain.
That means not just estate agents, but conveyancers, mortgage lenders and surveyors too.
For agents, the most immediate shift is in how you treat the point of instruction.
Under the current model, instruction means a signed contract. Under the reforms, instruction becomes the starting line for preparation.
That preparation includes property packs, digital identity checks, AML verification and, ideally, the seller instructing their conveyancer before the property even goes to market.
“Adopt your new seller process today. Get your seller to do their digital property pack upfront. Get your sellers to instruct their conveyancer pre-marketing. Get your title checked, get your searches ordered, do your digital identity and your AML checks all at the beginning.”
Maria Harris, Founder and Chair, OPDA
This is already happening. Agents using digital property packs and completing onboarding upfront are running smoother transactions today. The technology exists. What has been missing is a clear roadmap and collective commitment to standards.
The Scottish indication for what comes next
One of the most grounding parts of the roadmap debate is the example of Scotland, where upfront property packs have been mandatory for years.
The feared collapse in listings never happened. In fact, listings went up after the system was introduced, the opposite of what the industry feared, because consumers gained confidence in the process.
In countries where upfront information and binding agreements are the norm, transaction volumes are higher and consumers move more frequently.
Maria Harris pointed to a striking indicator of how broken consumer confidence has become: in England and Wales, average mobility has dropped from moving once every seven years to once every 12.
A large part of that is people choosing not to move again after a bad experience, and the money lost in fall-throughs.
The skills gap is as real as the data gap
Charlotte Jeffrey-Campbell, Director of The Able Agent, made a point that often gets overshadowed in conversations about technology and data: the reform roadmap has a significant training dimension, and many agencies are underprepared for it.
Material information has been on agents’ radar for a few years. But with Trading Standards guidance withdrawn and no enforcement clarity, many agencies parked it.
That changes with the reform roadmap. Material information guidance will now apply to the whole transaction chain, and the agents best placed to benefit will be those whose teams are already trained to ask the right questions at listing.
The right listing questions matter:
- Has the title been registered?
- Is there any unpermitted building work?
- Are there any known issues a buyer would want to know before making an offer?
Getting those answers upfront does not just protect agencies legally. It reduces the chance of a sale falling through further down the line.
“Make sure your team are experts. Make sure that they know every process of the transaction. And if they don’t, train them.”
Charlotte Jeffrey-Campbell, Director, The Able Agent
Completions over instructions
The most consistent thread across the entire reform roadmap conversation was the need to stop measuring success at the point of instruction and start measuring it at the point of completion.
Ask yourself whether your business is optimised for getting properties listed, or whether it is optimised for getting transactions completed.
Every instruction that does not complete is a cost to your client, their chain and your agency’s reputation.
Charlotte made the same point in different terms, describing an old management principle that still holds: “Instructions are vanity, sales are sanity.”
The reforms are designed to make the completion-focused mindset the default by ensuring more of the right information is in the right place before a property goes live.
What this means for your agency
Rethink your instruction process
Treat the signed contract as the starting line, not the finish line. Begin identity checks, digital property pack collection and conveyancer instruction at or before listing.
Audit your team’s knowledge
Review your team’s understanding of upfront information and the full transaction process. Do they know what questions to ask at valuation? Do they know what delays to spot before they happen?
Make AML part of your workflow from day one
Anti-money laundering checks have always been a legal requirement. Completing them at the point of instruction, alongside digital identity verification, positions your agency correctly and removes friction later.
Think about how you pitch your expertise
If your team are becoming trusted advisors who help sellers understand what could slow their sale before it starts, that is a service worth communicating clearly.
The reforms will not arrive all at once. The code of practice comes first. Mandatory qualifications, binding contracts and full digital property pack requirements will follow over a multi-year roadmap.
But the agencies that use the next 12 months to get ahead of the changes, rather than waiting to be told what to do, will be in a materially better position when the mandation arrives.
The roadmap is not just a compliance story. It is a chance to build a faster, clearer and more completion-focused agency process.
Get ahead of the reforms
Bring ID, AML and onboarding into one upfront workflow
Kotini helps agencies bring identity checks, AML and client onboarding together, supporting a smoother upfront process before the reforms become mandatory.
See how Kotini supports upfront onboarding
Use the next 12 months to build the process the reform roadmap is pointing towards.
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