2020 Year in Review

Today marks our one-year anniversary of joining the Landmark family. At the time of our acquisition, we steeled ourselves for a period of adjustment and growth. When we published our blog “How to fix these 4 conveyancing mistakes in 2020” we said our word for 2020 was expansion. Little did we know how accurate this would be!

When lockdown arrived in March we were in a fortunate position, as we’d already spent the previous year enabling remote working for our staff. When the time came to implement our business contingency plan, we simply rolled out this initiative to the rest of our people. The advantage of using all Cloud based applications enabled a smooth continuity of service to our customers, and we cannot emphasise enough our gratitude to all OneSearch employees for adapting with such ease.

The return of the housing market in May created a flurry of new transactions, jostling for space alongside the 450,000 people who’d been unable to progress their plans to move house. The bottlenecks appeared quickly as conveyancers contended with COVID-related congestion at every stage of the property transaction. Our Express indemnity policy has been invaluable for keeping transactions moving during these times, and will become more prevalent as we get closer to the Stamp Duty holiday deadline.

In June we celebrated 10 years of our Drainage & Water search, having surpassed over a quarter of a million sales. We’re delighted to see OneSearch DW become an integral part of the homebuyer transaction, as more conveyancers recognise its value and make it a standard part of their search bundles. 

By October we were reporting record high volumes across the board. In September 2020, we processed 93% more regulated local authority searches and an astonishing 127% more drainage & water reports than in September 2019. Celebrating another milestone, we also surpassed 5 million local, drainage & water, and environmental searches.

As we near the end of 2020, we can look back with pride, and look forward with optimism. Simon Brown, CEO of Landmark, commented: “What you have achieved in the last 12 months has been incredible, and we are delighted to see you all settle in. Acquisitions and integrations can be complex and challenging, but this has been a resounding success.“

Now it’s time for a breather.

Never has our industry been so in need of some downtime, and we hope you are able to enjoy a spot of respite before we launch ourselves into another unpredictable year. As much as the world may change, some things will stay the same: we’ll still be fighting against cybercrime; people will still move home and, until we hear any different, we still anticipate the cliff edge of the Stamp Duty holiday deadline on 31^st March.

At OneSearch, we’ll be here to support you every step of the way.

Thank you for all your support in 2020, and we wish you all the very best in 2021.

From all at OneSearch Direct

Please be advised we will be closing on Thursday 24th December at 1:00pm, and reopening on Monday 4th January at 8:30am. We’d like to take this opportunity to wish you a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!