Home-moving reform
What reforms mean for agents — with Matt Baldock
Kotini looks at why the home buying and selling reforms should push agents to rethink what really matters: not just winning the listing, but getting the transaction completed.
The practical takeaway
Do not wait for legislation: the process can improve before the reforms become law.
Move checks earlier: AML, identity verification and material information should start at instruction.
Create certainty: buyers and sellers can tolerate waiting if they understand what is happening and what comes next.
Focus on completion: the real agency win is not getting a property listed. It is getting the client moved.
The government says its home buying and selling reforms will shave four weeks off the average transaction.
That sounds decent, until you remember the average transaction currently takes 19 weeks.
Matt Baldock, Director at Charles David Casson, put it bluntly on a recent episode of the Kotini Coffee Table: getting excited about 15 weeks instead of 19 is like celebrating petrol at £1.60 a litre because it used to be £2. Agents have been conditioned to think slow is normal.
The reforms are not nothing. But if agents are waiting for legislation to fix fall-through rates or time to completion, they may be waiting a while.
The reform will not fix the thing that is actually costing agents money
Roughly one in three transactions in the UK falls through before completion. Every one of those is a family who put their lives on hold, told their kids about a new school, and then had to unwind all of it.
Baldock’s view is that the emotional cost is often treated as a throwaway statistic, when it is devastating for the people living through it and expensive for the agency that spent weeks or months on a sale that never closed.
The reforms are aimed at this problem, but detail still matters.
Condition reports and reusable AML checks could help, but there is not yet detail on what a condition report has to contain, or any requirement forcing mortgage lenders to accept it.
Baldock has seen this before with the Home Information Pack: a good idea undermined when lenders decided they would not rely on it, leaving buyers paying for a survey that achieved little except delay.
Structural problems, leasehold complexity, chains and lenders changing requirements at the last minute will not disappear because of one piece of legislation. What can change now is how much groundwork an agency does before a sale is even agreed.
People do not just want speed. They want to know what is happening.
One of the most useful reframes from the conversation was not about paperwork. It was about certainty.
Baldock compared the shift he wants to see in conveyancing to what Uber and Deliveroo did for food delivery, and what departure boards did for train stations. None of those changed the underlying speed. What changed is that people could see progress happening.
A 30-minute wait you can watch tick down feels manageable. A 30-minute wait with no information feels unbearable.
Transactions are the same. When clients understand where they are and what comes next, uncertainty drops.
A buyer or seller who knows a deal will take four months and understands why can live with that. A buyer or seller who has no idea what is happening, or why their solicitor has gone quiet for two weeks, starts to panic. Panic is when deals fall through.
The bottleneck is often admin nobody wants to do
Ask an agent where transactions get stuck and you will hear about conveyancers, mortgage lenders and legislation. Baldock’s take is more uncomfortable: a lot of the delay is paperwork people are slow to complete because it is boring.
AML checks have to be done twice, once by the agent and again by the solicitor. Property information forms sit unfilled because completing them is not the exciting part of moving home.
This is not about blaming conveyancers. Solicitors are working within their own insurance constraints and regulatory requirements, often under the same time and margin pressure agents are. Mortgage lenders are also part of the delay picture, even though they are often left out of the conversation.
Forms that could be completed in week one are often still outstanding in week eight, not because they are legally complicated, but because nobody made them a priority.
Baldock’s agency tackles this by pulling transaction forms into a single upfront flow at the point of instruction, rather than treating them as a separate step to chase later.
This is the layer Kotini’s onboarding platform is built to handle: collecting AML checks, identity verification and property information as one guided flow from the point of instruction, rather than as separate manual requests spread across agent, seller and solicitor.
The one obstacle nobody has a fix for
There is one part Baldock openly admits he has no answer to: chains.
In Australia and the US, chains barely exist, and deals can close in a matter of weeks. In the UK, a transaction can only move as fast as its weakest link, and no amount of upfront paperwork on your file fixes a different agent’s file three links down the chain.
What he does think is fixable is leasehold, and it is worth separating from freehold when talking about transaction speed.
The leasehold issue
Leasehold sales carry their own complications, from old leases on converted buildings to solicitors becoming more cautious because the risk of being sued has made judgement calls harder.
None of that gets solved by a condition report alone. It gets solved by agents who know their local leasehold stock well enough to flag issues before a buyer’s solicitor finds them weeks into the process.
Look for the completion, not the listing
“When you walk in as a valuer… just walk into it thinking I’m looking for the completion here not the listing.”
Matt Baldock, Director, Charles David Casson
Most valuations are pitched as a competition to win the instruction. Agents talk about their marketing, their Rightmove placement and their reach.
Almost none talk to the seller about what happens after the sale is agreed, or admit that the paperwork stage is where deals actually succeed or fail.
Saying the unglamorous part out loud can become a genuine differentiator.
Telling a seller you are going to ask for their forms and material information early because it gets them to completion faster is something the other agents may not have said.
There is a cost to this. It can take longer to get a property on the market when proper information is collected upfront. But Baldock is clear that the trade-off is worth it: sales agreed with the groundwork already done are far more likely to complete, and to complete without a late-stage renegotiation.
What collecting information upfront actually buys you
This is not theoretical for Baldock’s agency. He credited the speed of his own onboarding process directly: clients are signed up and material information is collected faster because it happens as one structured step, rather than a string of separate requests.
It is slower than the old take-a-photo-and-go approach, but that time is not wasted. It is reinvested into a file that is actually ready.
That creates two direct benefits:
- The buyer has the information they need to negotiate with confidence, making the sale more secure.
- The solicitor receives a file that is already in order, rather than starting from nothing once the sale is agreed.
The speed he describes is a direct effect of running AML checks, identity verification and material information collection through a single automated process rather than as parallel manual tasks.
Do not let late surveys become a bargaining chip
Baldock also flagged a pattern worth watching: private structural surveys that surface late in the process, often used, in his experience, as a renegotiation tactic once a buyer has had time to have second thoughts.
His suggestion is that buyers should be required to commission any private survey within the first two weeks of a sale being agreed. That is not government policy, but agencies can still build that expectation into how they manage every sale.
What this means for your agency
Start with real transaction blockers
Sit down with your sales progressor and ask what actually holds transactions up, then build a checklist from real cases rather than a generic template.
Move AML and material information to instruction
Treat checks and information collection as one upfront step, so the file is already in good shape before the solicitor receives it.
Spot issues before the buyer’s solicitor does
Look for unregistered titles, leasehold terms nobody has read, solar panels nobody can explain and other issues that may slow the sale.
Set expectations around surveys
If you want private surveys done, set an expectation with buyers about timing rather than letting them drift until a late survey becomes a bargaining chip.
Agents should also say the quiet part to sellers: they are not just trying to win the listing, they are trying to get them moved.
Agents who make that explicit stand out in a room where everyone else is pitching Rightmove reach and photography.
The reforms might tighten the rules eventually. Your process does not have to wait for that.
Build the upfront workflow
Collect AML checks and material information before the sale is agreed
Kotini’s onboarding tools help agencies collect AML checks, identity verification and material information as one guided flow, creating stronger files before pressure builds.
See how Kotini supports upfront onboarding
Get the groundwork done earlier, reduce avoidable delays and focus your agency process on completions.
