Every few years, the same question resurfaces: why does buying and selling a home still take so long, fall through so often, and feel so uncertain for consumers?
The answers are usually familiar. Too much paperwork. Too many professionals. Not enough digitisation. A lack of urgency. A lack of accountability.
But these explanations, while not entirely wrong, miss something more fundamental. The home buying process isn’t slow because the people involved don’t care. It’s slow because it is a coordination problem, operating across fragmented systems with limited shared visibility.
Understanding that distinction matters. Because if the problem is misdiagnosed, the solutions tend to disappoint.
Most participants in a property transaction are already highly motivated.
The system is not failing because people are disengaged. It is failing because each participant is operating with only a partial view of the transaction as a whole.
When something goes wrong in a chain, it is rarely because someone deliberately withheld information. More often, it’s because no one could see the full set of dependencies early enough to act on them.
Property chains are not an edge case. They are the dominant structure of the market.
Most transactions are not standalone exchanges between one buyer and one seller. They are part of a linked sequence of dependent transactions, where progress at one point is contingent on progress elsewhere.
Yet despite this, chain information is still treated as:
There is no shared, structured way of representing chain status that all parties can see, trust, and update.
As a result, decisions are often made in the dark. Buyers proceed without understanding upstream risk. Sellers assume progress that turns out not to exist. Professionals manage expectations without access to reliable, shared data.
This isn’t a failure of effort. It’s a failure of visibility.
There has been significant progress in digitising parts of the process. Case management systems, digital ID, electronic signatures, and data services are all improving efficiency at the margins.
But digitisation on its own doesn’t guarantee coordination.
If systems don’t interoperate, digitisation can even make fragmentation worse: faster silos instead of shared understanding.
The distinction that matters is between:
Without common data standards and trust frameworks, tools remain isolated. Information may be digital, but it is not portable or reusable. Each participant still sees only their slice of the picture.
Another recurring challenge is trust.
Even when information exists early, professionals are often reluctant to rely on it. Data without clear provenance, attribution, or validity rules tends to be rechecked, duplicated, or ignored. That erodes the efficiency gains digitisation promises.
This is why reform efforts that focus purely on when information is provided, rather than how it can be trusted, often struggle.
Trust is not a social issue here; it is an architectural one. Clear sourcing, responsibility, and update mechanisms are what allow information to be relied upon across organisational boundaries.
One of the least visible but most costly points of friction in the process is the handover between professionals.
The transition from estate agent to conveyancer, and later to lender and surveyor, is where momentum is often lost. Information gathered earlier is not always transferred in a structured way. Context is lost. Chains have to be reconstructed manually. Progress slows.
Again, this is not primarily a behavioural failure. It is a consequence of systems that are not designed to share structured transaction data across roles.
Another complexity is that oversight of the property transaction is fragmented across multiple regulatory regimes.
Each regulator quite properly focuses on professional conduct, compliance, and risk within its remit. But no single body is responsible for the end-to-end performance of the transaction itself.
This makes it hard to address problems that sit between professions rather than within them. Coordination failures, by definition, don’t belong neatly to one role or another.
That doesn’t mean regulation is ineffective — far from it. It means that improving outcomes requires attention not just to rules, but to the interfaces between roles and systems.
If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that meaningful improvement won’t come from a single intervention.
Progress depends on a combination of conditions:
These are not glamorous reforms. They don’t make headlines. But they address the structural reasons why effort and motivation so often fail to translate into certainty and speed.
It’s tempting to look for someone to blame when transactions stall or fall through. But blame is a poor substitute for design.
The home buying process is a complex, multi-party system. Systems like that don’t improve because participants care more; they improve because the environment makes coordination easier.
Seen through that lens, many familiar debates start to look different. The question becomes less about who should do more, and more about what information needs to exist, when, and in a form that others can trust and use.
That shift in perspective doesn’t solve everything and reasonable people will disagree about priorities and sequencing but it does help explain why so many well-intentioned reforms struggle — and where future progress is most likely to come from.
Improving home buying is not about fixing motivation. It’s about fixing visibility.