Chris Williams – June 2026
Home Buying and Selling Reform: What Mortgage Leaders Need to Do Now, Next and Later
Overview
On 19 June, the government released their reform roadmap for how homes will be bought and sold in the UK. For mortgage lenders, this is a balance-sheet story that aims to address the third of agreed deals collapsing. Whilst the roadmap might read as estate agency reform, there are critical infrastructure changes that will require lenders to digest and align priorities around. This briefing sets out what the roadmap means, what to do about it, and the order in which to do it. Because the lenders who win this will not be the ones who do the most. They will be the ones who do the right things first.
The Challenge
The instinct is to treat this as a data problem and buy your way out of it. That is the most expensive mistake available here. You can buy perfect data and still run a broken business, because what is broken is not the data but the coordination between you and everyone else in the chain. That is an operating-model problem, not a technology one.
Not Another False Start
The scepticism is fair. HIPs arrived in 2007 with ambition, but without the infrastructure, and was gone in three years. The difference this time is that the law, the standards and the delivery structure all exist at once. The question is no longer whether this is real. It is whether you are ready, and readiness is something you control.
The Cost You Already Pay
Most lenders can’t quantify what fragmentation costs them, because it is scattered across the journey and across other people’s businesses. It does not show up as a line on the P&L, but you are paying it all the same. Every fall-through carries sunk underwriting, valuation and processing cost, so the first move is not a fix; it is making the hidden number visible. You can’t manage what you have never measured. Everything in the roadmap ultimately does one of three things: gets you to offer faster, gets you to completion faster, or stops the deal dying in between. Sort every decision against those three outcomes and the noise falls away.
Why Data Alone Will Not Fix It
This is the part that matters most. You are already digital, and the journey still takes four months and still fails a third of the time. Every firm optimised its own vertical, but a transaction runs horizontally, across a dozen businesses that do not talk to each other. Data is only worth something if the next firm can receive it, trust it and act on it without rechecking. The industry calls this horizontal digital integration: stop perfecting your own piece, and start fixing the joins.
Open or Closed: the Big Design Decision
There is one decision that underpins all the others, and it belongs in front of your board first. This market will coordinate in one of two ways; open-loop or closed-loop. Open means a shared protocol that enables open participation – in the same way email works across providers. Closed loop means being on the same platform to participate – you need to be on WhatsApp to send and receive messages. There are benefits to both, but the design decisions need to be made first.
Pathfinder by Novus
Deciding where to start begins with seeing where value sits. Pathfinder shows you where your journey leaks, what each fix is worth, and what to do first. It gives lenders an evidence-based view, prioritised on your own numbers rather than a generic playbook.
Five Moves That Pay Off
None of these require legislation, and all of them pay off whatever the final rules say. The order matters as much as the moves.
- Own it at board level – a commercial decision, not a compliance one
- Baseline where your journey leaks – know your own numbers before you spend a pound
- Make the no-regret moves – reusable identity, remortgage, open standards
- Get in the room – while the rules are still being written
- Build the muscle you cannot buy – coordinating across organisational boundaries
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