Home Buying Digitalisation: Moving from Fragmentation to Certainty

For most people, buying a home is still one of the most stressful and unpredictable experiences they go through. That hasn’t meaningfully changed in decades.

The government’s consultation on home buying reform has surfaced the key challenges facing the industry:

• The average transaction still takes around five months to complete
• Nearly one in three transactions fall through before completion
• Visibility of progress is limited, leaving people unsure what is happening or what comes next

The home buying and selling experience has not kept pace with expectations as seen in other product across financial services. People can open a bank account or buy a car in minutes, yet moving home still feels slow, opaque and fragmented.

The issue is not the absence of technology. It is how the process works, or more accurately, how it doesn’t. 

Shifting the Focus from Steps to Journeys

Most attempts to improve home buying have focused on optimising individual steps: faster searches, digital onboarding, automated income and verification tools.

These changes help, but they don’t solve the underlying problem.

Home buyers and sellers don’t just experience the journey as a series of isolated steps. They also experience the gaps between them, where information is lost, repeated or delayed.

If we want to improve outcomes, we need to change how the journey works end-to-end.

The Structural Constraint: Fragmentation

The biggest barrier to better outcomes is not capability, but coordination.

Today, the home buying process relies on multiple parties – agents, brokers, lenders and conveyancers, operating across disconnected systems, with no shared mechanism for data reuse.

As a result:

• Information is shared inconsistently between parties
• Home buyers and sellers effectively act as the means by which data is passed between organisations

This is inefficient, but more importantly, it creates uncertainty at the point people feel it most.

Testing a Different Model

At Lloyds Banking Group, together with LMS and Connells, we launched a live pilot to test a simple idea:

What happens if we redesign the journey around trusted information, captured once and shared early?

The pilot uses LMS’s National Property Transaction Network (NPTN) to enable critical data such as property, identity and financial information to be reused across the transaction, rather than recreated at each step.

It also deliberately changes the sequencing of the journey:

• Sellers become “digital sale ready” upfront, providing core property information before listing
• Buyers’ complete identity and source of funds check earlier in the process
• Searches are initiated closer to property sale listing, rather than after an offer is agreed

Individually, these elements already exist. The shift is bringing them together earlier in the journey, before time, money and emotion are heavily invested.

Why This Matters for Home Buyers and Sellers

The current model stores risk late in the process. Issues often surface weeks into a transaction when home buyers are already committed. This is often at the root of fall-throughs and delays.

The pilot is designed to address this by bringing forward the point at which information becomes available and trusted.

Our working hypothesis, backed by indicators from LMS and Connells’ previous iteration of the pilot, is that this can deliver measurable improvements:

• ~30% reduction in end-to-end completion times
• ~20% reduction in fall-through rates

For home buyers and sellers, this means fewer late-stage surprises, a clearer understanding of progress and risk, and a higher likelihood of completing once an offer is agreed.

In simple terms, the process becomes more predictable.

Why Shared Infrastructure Matters

Solving this at scale requires a different approach. Not single connections between organisations but shared infrastructure that allows data to move securely and consistently between participants.

We can see the impact of this in other markets. In the Netherlands, the Hypotheken Data Netwerk (HDN) provides a standardised data exchange layer across lenders, brokers and other participants in the chain, enabling faster decisions and more predictable transactions.

This model is underpinned by a small number of clear principles:

• Data is captured once and reused
• Standards are consistent across the market
• Infrastructure is neutral and interoperable

Without these, digitisation risks recreating the same structural issues in a different form.

Moving Beyond Point-to-Point Integration

Interoperability is often positioned as the solution, but how it is delivered matters.

Point-to-point integrations may solve local problems, but they do not reach across the other steps on the home buying and journey. Each additional connection to a new organisation introduces more complexity behind the scenes.

An alternative approach is emerging:

• Integrate once to shared capabilities and standards
• Reduce duplication across the ecosystem
• Enable consistent experiences regardless of provider

This is what enables system-level change, rather than incremental improvement.

In summary

No single organisation can fix home buying on its own. Improvements to the customer experience will only materialise when the ecosystem moves together.

That requires coordination across lenders, agents, conveyancers, technology providers and government, aligned around a shared objective:

How do we ensure a consistent experience for home buyers and sellers, regardless of which organisations they choose to use?

This is not about removing competition. It is about shifting where it happens – away from basic infrastructure and towards better products, services and experiences.

If the industry can align on shared standards, infrastructure and ways of working, the opportunity is significant:

• Transactions measured in weeks, not months
• Lower fall-through rates
• Higher customer confidence across the process

Other markets show that this model can work at scale. The Netherlands demonstrates what is possible when the industry aligns around shared infrastructure and common standards. The challenge for the UK is not whether this approach works, but how quickly the industry can come together to implement it in a way that delivers better outcomes for home buyers and sellers.