The Roadmap Tells You What’s Coming. It Cannot Tell You Where to Start.

MHCLG’s Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap, revealed on 19 June 2026, has given the market something it has lacked for years: a published sequence of change. Reusable identity and AML checks, upfront information packs, binding conditional contracts earlier in the transaction, and wider reuse of HM Land Registry data. Lenders now know, with reasonable confidence, what is coming.

Where to start is a different question for every lender, and the answer cannot be found in the policy document, but found in your own numbers. The roadmap describes the measures, whereas your journey data describes where your money leaks: where time accumulates before offer, where cost is duplicated across parties, and where fall-through quietly writes off work already paid for. Two lenders reading the same roadmap should make different first moves, because their leaks are in different places.

It’s common to see lenders start with the measure that has the most industry noise behind it and work backwards to a business case. That produces a plan that looks like everyone else’s, sequenced by publication date rather than by commercial return.

Step one: baseline the journey

Before testing any roadmap measure, establish where time, cost and fall-through actually sit in your journey today. Not the process map on the wall. The measured journey: elapsed days from application to offer and from offer to completion, cost per case at each stage, and the fall-through rate with the sunk cost attached to each failed transaction.

This is the least glamorous step and the one most often skipped. Skip it and every business case that follows is an argument about opinions.

Step two: simulate each measure against that baseline

Each roadmap measure attacks a specific part of the journey, so test each one against the part of your baseline it actually touches.

Reusable AML and identity checks to address speed to offer. If your baseline shows identity and verification rework adding days before offer, this measure has something to work on. If it does not, the industry noise around it is not your business case.

Upfront information packs and binding conditional contracts to address fall-through cost. Their value depends on how many of your transactions fail late, after cost has been sunk, and for reasons that earlier information or earlier commitment would have removed.

HM Land Registry data reuse impacts most directly on remortgage cycle time, where title information is being re-established on every case despite already existing in usable form.

The output of this step is a ranked view: what each measure is worth, in your journey, expressed in days saved and cost avoided.

Step three: prioritise by impact and effort

Impact alone does not set the sequence. A measure worth more on paper may sit behind dependencies you do not control, while a smaller prize may be available this year with systems you already run. Plot modelled impact against delivery effort and the first move usually becomes obvious. It is rarely the measure with the loudest conference coverage.

A worked scenario

Illustrative only. The figures below are modelled for demonstration and are not drawn from any specific lender or external source.

Take a mid-sized lender with a 32-day average application-to-offer time, a 14 per cent fall-through rate on purchase cases, and an average sunk cost of £1,100 per failed transaction.

Simulating the three measures against that baseline: reusable AML removes an estimated 4 days from speed to offer. Upfront packs and binding conditional contracts reduce fall-through from 14 per cent to a modelled 9 per cent, recovering roughly £550,000 a year in sunk cost at 10,000 purchase cases. HMLR data reuse takes an estimated 6 days out of the remortgage cycle.

On impact alone, fall-through wins. Overlay effort and it changes: the fall-through measures depend on conveyancers, agents and other lenders moving together, while the AML change sits largely within the lender’s own control. The right first move for this lender is reusable AML, with the fall-through work sequenced behind it. A lender with a 6 per cent fall-through rate and a 45-day offer time would sequence it differently. That is the point.

The register that keeps this credible

None of this is an argument for a tool. We run this method through Pathfinder by Novus because simulation makes the trade-offs visible before investment is committed, but the discipline matters more than the software. A first move you can defend to your board rests on your own numbers, not the roadmap’s.

Your first move should come from your own numbers, not the publication order of the roadmap.