The Market Has Already Moved. The Home Buying and Selling Reform is Just the Answer.

Somewhere in your organisation, someone has already decided which desk the Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap belongs on. If it sits in compliance or conveyancing operations, you have a problem, and it isn’t the one they think they’re solving. The measures that matter for lenders reach pipeline conversion, capital velocity, AML cost and borrower retention. That’s a P&L and balance sheet matter, not a compliance brief. But here’s the thing worth putting in front of your board first: none of this depends on whether they believe the reform will land on schedule, or at all.

Look at what’s actually moving. Transaction volumes are recovering, up from 1,022,820 in 2023 to 1,102,010 in 2024, with HMRC’s monthly data showing that recovery continuing into 2026. The broker channel that now carries almost all that volume is growing too. Intermediaries arranged 61.9% of mortgage cases in 2014, currently sitting around 89% in 2025, with projected growth to 91% by 2026. More demand is entering the pipeline, through a channel that’s also growing, according to IMLA’s latest figures, alongside getting more dominant.

At the same time, the capacity to complete those transactions is shrinking. The number of licensed conveyancers has been falling steadily from 6,763 law firms and conveyancers to 5,904 in January 2026. HMLR data also aligns, with 3,425 registered in January 2026 compared to over 4,000 at the end of 2022. Solicitor numbers have also decreased in the comparative time period by around 2,000.

This is arithmetic happening in your current planning cycle: more cases in from a growing number of ingestion points and fewer hands to complete them, which can only show up as slower transactions, more fall-through and impacted capital velocity, regardless of what any government roadmap eventually delivers or when.

This is the part boards keep missing. The reform is the answer to a problem the market is going to force onto your numbers either way. Reusable evidence and data that travels with the transaction exist specifically to relieve pressure on a growing pool of case input and a shrinking pool of conveyancing capacity.

Whether your board finds the roadmap compelling is genuinely beside the point. The market conditions arrive regardless of what anyone in the room thinks of government reform. The only real choice is whether you’ve built anything to absorb the gap before it hits your fall-through rate, or whether you’re still deciding.

For what it’s worth, the industry has also already told government it agrees. Every single bank, lender and broker respondent to the MHCLG consultation backed mandatory upfront information and AML streamlining. Not a majority. All of them. So a board sceptical of the reform isn’t in disagreement with a fringe position, it’s out of step with its own sector’s stated view, on top of being out of step with what the market is already doing to its completion times.

If anyone reaches for the Home Information Packs comparison, it deserves one sentence: HIPs arrived as legislation without working standards, imposed on an industry that hadn’t asked for it. This is the opposite sequence.

And the mechanism itself isn’t unproven. A pilot run in late 2024, connecting a major estate agency group, property data providers and a panel of law firms, tested what happens when property, identity and financial information is captured once and reused across a transaction instead of recreated at every handoff. It cut cancellations by 43% and cut time to exchange by 35%. Eighteen months on, the same network underpins a live digital homebuying service backed by the UK’s largest estate agency group and its largest mortgage lender. Nobody can credibly ask to see this work before committing. It already has.

Which leaves scale as the real question, and it’s not the same size of problem across the chain. Around 340 regulated lenders operate in the UK, but the top 20 account for the overwhelming share of volume, so alignment doesn’t require the whole market, it requires a handful of institutions choosing to move.

If we look left and right of the mortgage journey, the scale question is two different problems wearing the same name. At pre-offer, more brokers are entering the market, with the number of brokerage firms up 4.3% last year alone. Layer this onto a channel that already carries the vast majority of mortgage business, what we have is fragmentation, not concentration: more individual points where the same information gets captured differently. The only fix for fragmentation is a shared data standard, Smart Data, and a trusted exchange, making the number of entry points irrelevant.

At post-offer, the problem inverts; fewer conveyancers and more transactions creating a shrinking pool of capacity that no amount of coordination fixes. The fix here is upfront information and Digital ID that’s portable, reusable and trusted, so less has to be redone by hand downstream. Same infrastructure, opposite reasons for needing it.

So the question for the next planning cycle isn’t whether the reform is worth backing. It’s three specific things to put in place and commit to delivering.

1. Who owns this? Not a working group weighing whether to participate. This needs one executive name, with the authority to move budget and commit the organisation to infrastructure that already works.
2. Where do you stand today? A baseline of your own fall-through rate and completion time today, before the conveyancing capacity you depend on shrinks any further and makes that baseline harder to recover from.
3. What does the next cycle fund? A standing line for scaling proven infrastructure, sized against your own baseline, not a discretionary pot competing with everything else labelled transformation.

Your board doesn’t need to be persuaded that the reform matters. It needs to notice that transaction volumes are recovering, the top of the case funnel is growing and fragmenting further, completion capacity is shrinking, and the gap between those two lines is going to show up in on your P&L whether or not anyone in the room ever reads the roadmap.

Sources: HMRC UK Property Transaction Statistics (2023, 2024, and monthly data through 2026). CBRE HMRC transactions (Dec 2023). Realting UK Housing Market Analysis (2025). IRN UK Residential Conveyancing Market Report (Mar 2026). Today’s Conveyancer – NPTN Pilot Reduced Completion Time 35 (Sept 2024). UK Finance MM10 (2024). IMLA, intermediary share of mortgage business. HM Land Registry, licensed conveyancer registrations. MHCLG, Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap, 19 June 2026, consultation response summary. NPTN pilot results (Property Industry Eye, Today’s Conveyancer, May 2025). Connells Group / Lloyds Banking Group / LMS digital homebuying service launch (Connells Group, April 2026). Bank of England MLAR statistics. IBIS World Mortgage Brokers in the UK – Number of Businesses (2021-2031).