Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap Reaction

Getting a signed contract has long been the moment estate agents celebrate. But the government’s home buying and selling reform roadmap – published in June 2026 – makes a compelling case that this is the wrong finish line. If a transaction takes an average of 120 days to complete after offer acceptance, and that’s 60% longer than it took in 2007, something in the process isn’t working. And the reforms are designed to fix it.

The question for your agency is: are you ready to shift how you think about what success looks like?

The problem isn’t just the data – it’s the mindset

Most people working in estate agency know the process is slow. What’s harder to admit is that the industry has, in many cases, designed itself around managing that slowness rather than solving it.

Alice Bullard, CEO of Nested, put it plainly during a recent Kotini Coffee Table discussion on the roadmap:

“We’ve normalised a process that isn’t actually very good. I think you just have to take a moment to really understand that. We’ve been doing this for years and decades, and it is just a really bad process.”

• Alice Bullard, CEO, Nested

The statistics back this up. OPDA’s consumer research found that two thirds of people said they were so put off by their experience of moving home that they weren’t planning to move again. That’s not just bad for consumers – it actively reduces the supply of properties coming to market. The people who should be downsizing stay put. Families who want to upsize can’t find what they need. The whole market slows.

The reform roadmap – backed by more than 1,100 consultation responses, with 82% of respondents supporting its overall objectives – represents the clearest signal yet that this is going to change. Support for individual proposals was similarly strong, with most elements receiving 70-86% approval. The two areas that fell short of that level were mandatory qualifications and binding offers – not because respondents opposed the end goals, but because they wanted a proper staged roadmap to get there first. The direction of travel is mandatory. The question is whether you want to get there early or be pushed there later.

What the reforms actually require

The roadmap covers several interconnected areas: mandatory upfront sales packs, a code of practice for estate agents, qualification requirements, binding conditional contracts, and material information guidance that will apply across the entire transaction chain – not just estate agents, but conveyancers, mortgage lenders, and surveyors too.

For agents, the most immediate shift is in how you treat the point of instruction. Under the current model, instruction means a signed contract. Under where the reforms are heading, instruction means the starting line for preparation: property packs, digital identity checks, anti-money laundering (AML) verification, and ideally the seller instructing their conveyancer before the property even goes to market.

Maria Harris, Founder and Chair of the Open Property Data Association (OPDA), framed it clearly:

“Adopt your new seller process today. Get your seller to do their digital property pack upfront. Get your sellers to instruct their conveyancer pre-marketing. Get your title checked, get your searches ordered, do your digital identity and your AML checks all at the beginning.”

• Maria Harris, Founder and Chair, OPDA

This is already happening. Agents using digital property packs and completing onboarding upfront are running smoother transactions today. The technology exists. What’s been missing, as Maria put it, is “a clear roadmap and everybody committing to working together on the standards.”

The Scottish indication for what comes next

One of the most grounding parts of the roadmap debate is the example of Scotland, where upfront property packs have been mandatory for years. The feared collapse in listings never happened. In fact, listings went up after the system was introduced – the opposite of what the industry feared – because consumers gained confidence in the process.

Nested already operates in Scotland, which gives Alice Bullard a direct view of what the English market is moving towards.

“It’s really hard to argue that taking 6 months for a transaction is a good thing.”

• Alice Bullard, CEO, Nested

In countries where upfront information and binding agreements are the norm, transaction volumes are higher and consumers move more frequently. Maria Harris pointed to a striking indicator of how broken consumer confidence has become: in England and Wales, average mobility has dropped from moving once every 7 years to once every 12. A large part of that is people choosing not to move again after a bad experience – and the money lost in fall-throughs.

The binding conditional contract element of the reforms – which would bring England closer to the Scottish model – addresses fall-throughs and gazumping directly. The reason it’s taken so long to get here isn’t that it’s technically difficult. It’s that, as Alice noted, “it’s incredibly difficult to change a process where millions of people have learned to work around it.”

Mandatory reform is what breaks that inertia.

The skills gap is as real as the data gap

Charlotte Jeffrey-Campbell, Director of The Able Agent, made a point that often gets overshadowed in conversations about technology and data: the reform roadmap has a significant training dimension, and many agencies are underprepared for it.

Material information – the upfront disclosure of all information relevant to a buyer’s decision to make an offer – has been on agents’ radar for a few years. But with trading standards guidance withdrawn and no enforcement clarity, many agencies parked it. Charlotte described agents as having “almost parked it a little bit because we lost the Trading Standards guidance. We haven’t got that. So we’ve got nothing to hang our hat on.”

That changes with the reform roadmap. Material information guidance will now apply to the whole transaction chain. And the agents best placed to benefit will be those whose teams are already trained to ask the right questions at listing: Has the title been registered? Is there any unpermitted building work? Are there any known issues with the property that a buyer would want to know before making an offer?

Getting those answers upfront doesn’t just protect you legally – it reduces the chance of a sale falling through further down the line.

The qualification piece is also worth taking seriously, even for agencies who feel they already have skilled teams. Charlotte noted that experienced agents who believe they know everything sometimes fail qualification assessments by one mark, because there’s a specific area of property law they’ve never needed to think about before. Gaps in knowledge are normal. The question is whether you’ve identified yours.

“Make sure your team are experts. Make sure that they know every process of the transaction. And if they don’t, train them.”

• Charlotte Jeffrey-Campbell, Director, The Able Agent

Completions over instructions – the mindset shift that ties it together

The most consistent thread across the entire reform roadmap conversation was the need to stop measuring success at the point of instruction and start measuring it at the point of completion.

Alice Bullard was direct about where the current incentive structure goes wrong. Corporate agencies, she argued, have built their KPIs around signed contracts rather than completed sales. That shapes everything downstream – the advice given at valuation, the information collected at listing, the support offered during conveyancing.

“Ask yourself whether your business is optimised for getting properties listed, or whether it’s being optimised for getting transactions completed.”

• Alice Bullard, CEO, Nested

Charlotte made the same point in different terms, describing an old management principle that still holds: “Instructions are vanity, sales are sanity.”

That’s not a criticism of growth. It’s a reminder that every instruction that doesn’t complete is a cost – to your client, to their chain, and to your agency’s reputation. The reforms are, in many ways, designed to make the completion-focused mindset the default, by ensuring that more of the right information is in the right place before a property goes live.

What this means for your agency

You don’t need to wait for secondary legislation to start making changes. Here’s where to begin.

Rethink your instruction process. Treat the signed contract as the starting line, not the finish line. That means beginning identity checks, digital property pack collection, and conveyancer instruction at or before listing – not after offer acceptance.

Audit your team’s knowledge. Not just on upfront information, but across the full transaction process. Charlotte’s skills analysis tool is one option, but any structured review will surface the gaps. Do your team know what questions to ask at valuation? Do they know what delays to look for before they happen?

Make AML part of your workflow from day one. Anti-money laundering checks have always been a legal requirement. Under the reformed process, completing them at the point of instruction – alongside digital identity verification – positions your agency correctly and removes friction later. Tools like Kotini make this part of a single onboarding workflow rather than a separate step that gets chased later.

Think about how you pitch your expertise. Charlotte raised a point worth sitting with: estate agents give away a great deal of advice for free. If your team are genuinely becoming trusted advisors – helping sellers understand what’s going to slow their sale before it even starts – that’s a service worth communicating clearly to prospective clients.

The reforms won’t arrive all at once. The code of practice comes first. Mandatory qualifications, binding contracts, and full digital property pack requirements will follow over a multi-year roadmap. But the agencies that use the next 12 months to get ahead of the changes – rather than waiting to be told what to do – will be in a materially better position when the mandation arrives.

If you’d like to understand how Kotini can help you bring identity checks, AML, and client onboarding into a single upfront workflow, get in touch with the team.