There’s a particular kind of stress that comes with being responsible for something you can’t control.

You’ve done the work. You’ve filed everything correctly. But the transaction is slow, the client is anxious, and every time your phone rings you already know why. You handle it. You move on. You do the same thing on the next file.

That accumulates. And because it’s so consistent, because it’s just how the job is, it’s easy to stop noticing.

It’s worth naming what that actually is. You’re being asked to absorb anxiety you didn’t create, on a timeline you can’t influence, while remaining the calm, professional point of contact for everyone involved. That’s not just difficult, it’s a specific kind of difficult. The kind that doesn’t always get acknowledged because it looks, from the outside, like you’re just doing your job.

Mental Health Awareness Week feels like a reasonable moment to say: yes, but at what cost.

The things that genuinely help

None of these will be news to you. But they’re worth saying plainly.

• Set boundaries where you can: You don’t have to be reachable by every client at all hours. Most clients, given clear expectations early in the relationship, will work within them. The ones who won’t are a different problem, but they’re the exception, not the rule.
• Get your caseload visible: The ambient pressure of not quite knowing where everything stands is draining in a way that’s easy to underestimate. A clear picture of what’s actually in progress, even a basic one – reduces that background noise.
• Talk to someone: Conveyancing can be oddly solitary for a team-based job. If something is weighing on you, speak to a colleague, a supervisor, or someone outside work. It helps more than you realise.
• Know that support exists: LawCare provides free, confidential help to anyone working in the legal sector. It’s not just for crisis situations. lawcare.org.uk

The connection between the two

Everything in the guide we published this week applies to you as much as to your clients. Every proactive update you send is one fewer anxious call to deal with. Every clear expectation you set is one fewer difficult conversation. The habits that reduce client anxiety also, quietly, reduce yours.

That’s not a coincidence. It’s the point.

The full guide: Managing Client Anxiety Through a Transaction is available here:

If you’re finding the pressures of legal practice difficult, LawCare provides free, confidential support to legal professionals. Visit lawcare.org.uk or call 0800 279 6888.

Conveyancing is built on process. For your clients, it’s built on emotion.

By the time a transaction starts to slow, most people have already spent weeks worrying; about timings, about money, about whether everything will fall apart at the last hurdle.

That anxiety doesn’t disappear. It builds, and sooner or later, it comes to you.

According to Landmark Information Group’s 2026 market research, the average transaction takes 123 days from instruction to completion. Conveyancers spend 41% of their working day chasing or being chased for updates. And 42% cite slow transaction times as their number one professional frustration.

Behind every one of those delays is a client who doesn’t fully understand what’s happening, why it’s taking so long, or whether it’s still going to complete at all. That uncertainty is where anxiety takes hold.

Mental Health Awareness Week feels like the right moment to address this directly; not with platitudes, but with something practical.

What the guide covers

We’ve put together a free guide: Managing Client Anxiety Through a Transaction. It’s written for conveyancers who want to manage the human side of a transaction as competently as the legal side, without it consuming more of your day than it already does.

The guide covers five areas:

• Why delays hit clients so hard: and why the anxiety response is rational, not irrational
• What anxious clients actually need: which is often not what they say they need
• Communication habits that reduce anxiety without adding to your workload
• Looking after yourself: because practitioner wellbeing matters too, and it’s under-discussed in this industry
• A quick-reference checklist: a clean pull-out you can keep to hand or share with your team

This isn’t a therapy guide, and it isn’t a sales presentation. It’s the kind of thing you might work through with a colleague over coffee – practical, direct, and grounded in how conveyancing actually works.

Why we wrote it

Delays aren’t always avoidable. But the anxiety they create often is… or at least, it can be reduced significantly with the right communication habits and a clear head about what clients actually need from you.

That’s a conversation worth having, and Mental Health Awareness Week is a good prompt to have it.

Managing Client Anxiety Through a Transaction is free to access: no form to fill in, no follow-up sequence.

Uncertainty isn’t new to the housing market, but in 2026 it feels closer to the surface.

Affordability pressures, shifting mortgage conditions, and broader economic headwinds mean buyers and sellers are hesitating for longer and thinking harder before committing.

That hesitation has a knock-on effect for conveyancers. Transactions take longer to progress, confidence can fluctuate mid-process, and the risk of late-stage disruption increases.

In a recent podcast conversation, OneSearch Managing Director Liz Jarvis was joined by Millar & Bryce Managing Director Richard Hepburn to explore how that uncertainty is showing up in today’s market, and why one factor matters more than most when it comes to keeping transactions on track: clear, upfront information about the property.

Confidence is built early, or it isn’t built at all.

When buyers feel uncertain – about affordability, their finances, or the property itself – they pause. And when transactions pause, momentum is lost.

As Liz puts it: “The biggest thing that drives the market is how confident people feel.”

For conveyancers, this makes the early stages of a transaction critical. The more unknowns that sit unresolved at the start, the greater the chance they resurface later as friction, delay, or a deal-breaker. Upfront information helps remove that uncertainty sooner, before emotional and financial investment deepens.

A slower market doesn’t automatically mean weaker transactions.

An important distinction worth holding onto: a quieter market doesn’t automatically mean poorer outcomes. As Liz notes, “What we’re seeing now is fewer buyers, but they’re committed buyers.”

Those still active are people who need to move, not casual browsers. That means transactions are often more likely to complete, but only if unexpected issues don’t surface late in the journey.

Time is where risk creeps in.

Longer transaction timelines give uncertainty more room to grow. The more time that passes between offer and completion, the more chance there is for circumstances to change, priorities to shift, or doubts to set in. In England and Wales, where extended timelines are already the norm, that window of vulnerability is wider than most.

Why upfront information matters now.

Upfront information isn’t about adding friction at the start of a transaction. It’s about helping buyers and sellers make informed decisions sooner, so they commit with confidence rather than assumptions.

Liz summarises it simply: “It’s allowing people to get access to information around the property… before they move further into the process.”

When clarity comes late, trust erodes quickly. When it comes early, transactions tend to feel calmer, more predictable, and more resilient.

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If keeping transactions on track matters to your firm this year, the full conversation with Liz and Richard is worth twenty-five minutes of your time.

👉 Watch or listen here:

Every conveyancer knows the feeling. The file is progressing well, deadlines are manageable, and then something surfaces in the search data that doesn’t quite fit.

A conflicting record. A missing detail. A query that arrives too late to resolve cleanly. These moments rarely come from nowhere. More often they’re the predictable consequence of a gap in the data, something that was available but not caught, or available but not ordered.

Here are four of the risks that appear most consistently, and what good search data looks like in each case.

Planning history that doesn’t travel with the property

Planning records are among the most commonly misread elements in a local authority search – not because the data is wrong, but because it requires interpretation. A restriction that applied to a previous use, a consent that was granted but never implemented, a condition attached to an older permission that the current owner has quietly ignored – none of these are hidden. They’re in the data. But they require someone to look at the full picture rather than the headline.

The risk is greatest on properties with complex histories: former commercial uses, extensions built under permitted development, conversions from one use class to another. In conservation areas, the detail required is even more precise – not just whether works were approved, but whether they were approved under the correct consent route.

The search data should surface this. If it doesn’t, the problem isn’t the planning history – it’s the search.

Rights of way that aren’t visible on site

Public rights of way are a good example of a risk that feels theoretical until it isn’t. A right of way that crosses a garden or driveway doesn’t affect every transaction – but when it does affect one, and the buyer wasn’t told, the consequences are significant and the firm’s position is uncomfortable.

The challenge is that rights of way aren’t always visible on the ground. A path that hasn’t been walked in years is still legally protected. A route that’s been physically blocked by a previous owner remains on the definitive map. The seller may be entirely unaware.

A local authority search will include rights of way data, but the quality of that data varies considerably depending on the source and how recently it was verified. Knowing where your provider’s data comes from, and how current it is, matters more for this particular risk than almost any other.

Chancel repair liability on older rural stock

Chancel repair liability is one of those risks that experienced conveyancers are well aware of and occasionally encounter in practice. The liability, which can require a property owner to contribute to the cost of repairing the chancel of a local parish church, dates from medieval land law and is tied to the land rather than the owner’s beliefs or connection to the church.

Since 2013, unregistered chancel repair liability is no longer an overriding interest, meaning it must be registered to bind a purchaser. But for properties that changed hands before that date, registered liability can still exist and still bite.

The appropriate response is straightforward, a chancel search where the risk exists, and indemnity insurance where it’s warranted. The less straightforward part is identifying which properties warrant the extra step. Rural properties, older stock, and land near historic parish churches are the obvious candidates. The search data should prompt the question.

Flood risk that isn’t reflected in the asking price

Flooding is increasingly well understood as a property risk, but the gap between what a standard environmental search flags and what a property is genuinely exposed to has widened as climate patterns have shifted. A property that last flooded in 1987 may carry a lower risk rating than one that flooded in 2020 – but both carry risk, and neither is necessarily reflected in what the seller has disclosed.

The specific risk that catches firms out most often isn’t river or coastal flooding, which tends to be well mapped. It’s surface water flooding, the kind that results from drainage systems being overwhelmed during heavy rainfall, which is harder to model, less consistently reported, and increasingly common in areas that haven’t historically been considered at risk.

An environmental search that draws on current flood mapping, drainage records, and historical incident data gives a materially different picture from one that relies on older datasets. The difference matters when you’re advising a client on whether to proceed and on what terms.

What connects all four

None of these risks are obscure. Every conveyancer reading this will have encountered at least one of them in practice. What connects them is that they’re all data problems before they’re legal problems – and in each case, the quality and currency of the search data determines whether the issue surfaces at the right moment or the wrong one.

The search isn’t just a regulatory requirement. It’s the foundation on which advice is built. It’s worth knowing exactly what yours is built on.

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For a closer look at how search data quality affects conveyancing outcomes – and what to look for when assessing your current provider – download our guide.

Change is coming to the way firms handle SDLT submissions, and while the full impact will vary from team to team, it’s something every conveyancer should have on their radar before May.

For most practices, SDLT has long been a familiar, end‑of‑transaction step: reliable, predictable, and rarely the part that causes delays. But with new expectations on the horizon, firms may soon find that this once‑simple stage needs a closer look.

We’re not here to overwhelm you with detail. Instead, we’ve created a short downloadable guide, which highlights what’s shifting, why it matters for day‑to‑day workflows, and how conveyancers can stay ahead without adding pressure to an already busy post‑completion process.

If your day to day tasks include SDLT in any way, now’s a good moment to take stock. Grab our guide for all the details.

International Women’s Day 2026 invites us to recognise achievements and reaffirm our dedication to equality and progress. The theme, “Give to Gain,” perfectly reflects our belief at OneSearch that shared knowledge and mutual support make us stronger as a team, and as an industry.

When we support one another, we don’t just fill roles; we unlock potential.

Women Leading the Way

Across Landmark Information Group, women continue to play a central role in shaping the direction and culture of our business. Today, 71 women hold management positions across the Group. This progress reflects our determination to build a leadership structure that not only performs, but truly represents the talent, capability, and diversity of our teams.

Celebrating Career Progression

Progression remains at the heart of our culture, and this past year has highlighted the impact of that commitment. Eleven women – accounting for 41% of all promotions – have stepped into new roles, demonstrating the ambition, expertise, and dedication that continue to drive us forward.

These achievements are more than milestones; they reflect the environment we work to foster every day – one where people feel supported to grow, stretch themselves, and take their next step with confidence.

Alongside Group‑wide progress, International Women’s Day gives us an opportunity to highlight our OneSearch colleagues whose individual contributions make a meaningful difference across the business.

Jade’s professionalism, adaptability, and passion for contributing to the organisation make her an exceptional colleague whose influence extends well beyond her role.

We are also delighted to recognise Laura McNaughton, whose positivity, dedication, and commitment to supporting colleagues make her an invaluable part of OneSearch.

A winner and multiple nominee of the Remarkable Reward, Laura is known for stepping forward to support initiatives that improve the working environment for everyone. Her involvement in projects such as the Culture Crew and Employee Gateway reflects her passion for strengthening our internal culture and making OneSearch a better place to work.

Her colleagues describe her as:

“A great support… with so many changes happening, her input has been invaluable. I couldn’t have done it without her.”

and:

“A highly respected and valuable member of our community… personable, friendly and motivated, actively creating a fun and collaborative working environment.”

Laura’s contribution is felt widely – not only in the work she delivers, but in the energy, encouragement, and positivity she brings to those around her.

Recognising the Women of OneSearch

Today, we celebrate the expertise, resilience, and leadership of the women across OneSearch. Your contributions strengthen our service, support our customers, and help shape the continued success of our organisation.

Thank you for everything you bring to our teams and to our customers.