Over the past decade, conveyancing platforms have materially improved how individual transactions are processed. Compliance is tighter, documents are handled digitally, and workflows within cases are clearer and more structured than they were ten years ago.
And yet coordination work has not reduced. In many firms, it has increased. That looks like a contradiction, but it isn't. The explanation lies in what these systems were designed to do — and what they were never asked to do.
Most case management systems are built around a single organising unit: the file. That made sense. Conveyancing work is executed file-by-file, and risk, responsibility and billing all sit within files. Soplatforms optimised exactly what they could see and control, and within that boundary, progress has been real.
But coordination problems don't live inside files. They live between them.
Around 55% of UK residential transactions sit inside chains, where progress in one transaction depends on progress elsewhere, risk is collective rather than individual, and delay is rarely confined to a single file.
A file can look busy and well-managed while the chain it sits inside is structurally blocked three links away. The trouble is that file-centric systems can report on activity — tasks completed, documents received, milestones reached — but they cannot show whether that activity is decisive. They have no way of knowing whether the chain as a whole can actually complete, or whether effort is being spent on a transaction that will collapse several links away.
So coordination work fills the gap — chasing, reconciliation, escalation, buffers built into timelines — not because professionals lack discipline, but because the systems they rely on cannot show them the wider picture.
It is worth being clear about this. Platforms didn't "miss" the problem. At the time these systems were designed, chain data was fragmented across firms, cross-firm visibility was impractical, and reconstructing live chain structures at scale was unrealistic. Optimising the file was the only rational move, and the abstraction wasn't wrong, just incomplete.
Two things have shifted.
First, the information required to understand chain structure is no longer fragmented beyond practical use. Reconstructing chains, and keeping them current as transactions progress, is now operational.
Second, the industry is starting to encode this into standards. The Open Property Data Association's Property Data Trust Framework now includes milestones as a core component, designed explicitly to enable progress updates to be shared consistently across all parties in a transaction. The stated goal is to reduce manual chasing and ensure everyone has a clear view of the chain — not a vendor feature but an emerging industry standard.
The government-backed Open Property Coalition, launched late last year with support from the Department for Business and Trade, is coordinating efforts across MHCLG, HM Land Registry and OPDA to accelerate exactly this kind of infrastructure.
File-level optimisation has reached its limit. Platforms can keep improving workflows within cases — faster searches, better compliance, cleaner task management — but the coordination tax is immune to that work because it doesn't live inside files but in the dependencies between them, and the only way to reduce it is to make those dependencies visible.
Platforms that can show their users the state of the chain will reduce coordination work. Those that cannot will find their users still chasing, reconciling and buffering, regardless of how good the file-level tooling becomes.
The coordination tax doesn't care how efficient your case management is.
#conveyancing #proptech #propertydata #homebuying