UK is home to slowest property selling timeline globally, study finds – The Intermediary

The UK has the slowest home moving timeline among 12 global nations, market insight from Material Information and Moverly has revealed.

Moverly analysed the average time to sell a home in 12 countries that UK citizens often choose to emigrate to.

Across all 12, it took an average of 110 days for a property to go from its initial listing through to completion.

The fastest home selling nation was the USA where it took an average of just 53 days to go from listing to closing.

In the UK it took the longest – an average of 179 days, or almost six months – to go from listing to completion.

This was 70% longer than the USA, equivalent to a difference of 126 days.

Other nations with fast selling processes included UAE (70 days), New Zealand (72 days), Canada (90 days), and Australia (95 days).

The nations where home selling came close to taking as long as it does in the UK were Italy (159 days), Spain (152 days), Portugal (152 days), and Singapore (152 days), while Germany (137 days), and France (105 days).

Gemma Young, CEO of Moverly, suggested that the issues with the UK process were the result of its idiosyncrasies causing bumps and obstacles that sellers and property professionals have to navigate throughout the selling journey, many of which other countries have managed to iron out over the years.

These included archaic conveyancing practices and elongated windows in which buyers and sellers are legally allowed to pull out of transactions.

Young said: “It seems you have to move halfway around the world to access a decent home selling process.

“The Americans are showing the rest of the world up while the UK is making everyone else look very good!

“That’s not to say the US model is better, but it’s certainly much faster and we should be doing everything we can to speed up what has become a painfully sluggish journey here in the UK.”

She added: “Conveyancing is a definite culprit when it comes to delaying the selling process, and this is because too many of the legal processes that pave the way to exchange of contracts have remained unchanged for decades, if not longer.

“By simply streamlining and digitising many of the conveyancing processes, we have proven that the time to sell can be reduced from up to 70%, which means the UK is perfectly capable of matching the speed of the US market.

“As more and more agents and conveyancers adopt the tech solutions that are now widely available to them, we expect the UK’s performance to see radical improvement in a short period of time.”