For years, discussions about improving the housing market have centred on affordability. Stamp Duty, mortgage rates, planning reform and housing supply have dominated political debate. Yet anyone who has actually bought a home knows that affordability is only part of the story.
Article originally published in The Intermediary - August 2026
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s latest announcement on reforming the process is therefore significant, not because it introduces a single revolutionary idea, but because it finally acknowledges something the industry has known for years: the transaction itself has become outdated. A process that routinely takes four to six months, sees one in three sales collapse, and costs buyers, sellers and the wider economy hundreds of millions of pounds each year is no longer fit for purpose.
The proposed reforms are sensible. Earlier provision of information through sales packs, greater use of digital identity, electronic signatures, AI-assisted conveyancing and more consistent property data all address genuine friction points. They recognise that much of today’s delay is not caused by a lack of effort from professionals, but by fragmented information, duplicated activity and disconnected systems.
Digital transformation should not mean accelerating inefficient processes. It should mean redesigning them altogether.
Whether supporting lenders with richer property intelligence, improving valuation workflows or enabling access to trusted data through innovations such as Lender Hub, our objective has never simply been digitisation for its own sake.
For decades, the industry has accepted an extraordinary amount of repeated effort. The same property information is requested multiple times. Identity is verified repeatedly. Data is rekeyed across numerous systems. Documents are produced, checked and recreated by different parties despite often containing identical information. Every handoff introduces delay. Every delay introduces uncertainty. Every uncertainty increases the risk of a transaction failing. What creates value is certainty.
A lender that has immediate access to reliable property information makes better lending decisions. A conveyancer working from consistent digital records spends less time chasing missing information. Estate agents can manage expectations more effectively. Buyers understand what they are purchasing much earlier in the process. Sellers avoid nasty surprises. The common denominator is trusted data and timely access to it.
The Government’s ambition to reduce transaction times by around four weeks and significantly reduce fall-throughs will not be achieved by policy announcements alone. It will require the industry to embrace common standards, interoperable systems and far better use of data. This will require investment, but also a change in mindset.
Too often, transformation projects have been justified through operational savings, but in a world of increasing scrutiny, the primary objective should be improving outcomes for consumers.
A question of productivity
If buyers can move with greater certainty, if lenders can make more informed decisions, if professionals spend less time administering transactions and more time advising customers, everyone benefits.
The mortgage market has already demonstrated that digital transformation works when it is implemented thoughtfully. Automated valuation models (AVMs), richer property datasets, digital identity solutions and integrated lender platforms have steadily reduced friction across individual parts of the customer journey. The next challenge is joining those improvements together, so the transaction operates as one connected ecosystem.
Services such as Lender Hub demonstrate how trusted property intelligence can be embedded directly into lender workflows, enabling faster decisions without compromising governance or risk management. It is about giving decision-makers access to better information at the point they need it.
The infrastructure supporting homebuying has remained largely unchanged, while consumer expectations, technology and the wider financial services industry have evolved dramatically. The Government’s announcement is recognition that process has become every bit as important as policy.
If we want a housing market that is faster, fairer and more resilient, we must stop treating digital transformation as a technology project. It is an infrastructure project, and the winners will not simply be those that digitise existing processes, they will be those that use trusted data to redesign them entirely.
