Landmark’s major new cross-market report has uncovered the top challenges and priorities for 2024 shared by estate agents, conveyancers, surveyors and lenders across the transaction chain.  

Our new cross-market report found that market challenges and the length of time it takes to complete a transaction to be among the top frustrations shared by all residential property professionals. 

The report, entitled ‘Future Thinking: what’s driving property professionals into 2024?’, features the views of hundreds of estate agents, conveyancers, surveyors and lenders.  

A striking convergence  

Our findings highlight some of the challenges and frustrations that senior property professionals are currently prioritising and sense-checks these against the aspirations of home movers.  

Here are some of the key headlines:  

  • Economic headwinds have clearly affected the sector, with over 75% of all groups citing the current economic climate, interest rates and the cost of living as a leading business concern for the next year.   
  • The length of time to complete a transaction was a top three frustration in the transactional process for estate agents (37%), surveyors (40%) and lenders (36%).
  • The ever-increasing regulatory and admin burden placed on property professionals appeared as a top five frustration for all four groups, with lenders ranking highest in this area, with 55% agreeing.  
  • All groups spent over 20% of their working days chasing or being chased – with poor communication among stakeholders cited as a top five frustration for estate agents and conveyancers in particular.   
  • Looking ahead, better technology and less administration were seen a key for all groups in improving efficiencies and reducing costs. 

Protracted timeframes  

Our research also canvassed the views of 500 home movers, with this group also sharing the sentiment expressed by property professionals to speed-up transactions. In fact, the majority of consumers aspired to wrap up their home moves within an 8-week timeframe – which is in stark contrast to the current average transaction time of 19 weeks1.  

A desire for digitisation  

The report also highlighted a remarkable consensus regarding the best solutions to addressing these challenges. Digitising workflows featured highly for three of the four groups, with surveyors (63%) and lenders (55%) ranking it as the leading factor that would have the biggest impact on productivity, and estate agents placing it third (41%.)   

Simon Brown, CEO, Landmark Information Group says:   

“Our research has thrown into sharp focus the many shared challenges our sector is facing. It also reminds us that we’re all part of the same property ecosystem, and although our roles and areas of expertise are different, we share more areas of commonality than we perhaps thought.   

“If we are all experiencing some of the same frustrations around difficult communications, increasing amounts of administration and a desire for better technology, then we need to focus on a collaborative solution to provide the speed and certainty the property professionals and consumers are so desperately craving.”   

Access our new market research report here.

This is a snippet of a blog post written by Simon Boyle, a solicitor from Landmark Information Group, reflecting on thoughts post-COP 27. To read the full post, click here.

The 27th Conference of the Parties held at Sharm el-Sheikh has drawn to a close. As with the previous COPs it has had mixed results. There was a positive development in the agreement to set up the loss and damage fund to help the poorest countries- but overall it did not deliver that which was urgently needed- a binding target on the big emitters whose economies are still mainly powered by fossil fuels. At the start of the conference Alok Sharma (President of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference and British Politician) warned that this was the last opportunity that world leaders had to ensure that the global temperature would not exceed 1.5 degrees c.

But with the failure to agree on binding targets, especially from the three biggest emitters China, US and India, it is looking almost certain that the critical 1.5°C goal set by the Paris COP in 2015 is not going to be achieved.

This should be ringing alarm bells across the world. We are already experiencing the effects of climate change from the 1.1°C rise that we have had so far. And of course, things will get a lot worse once we get to the 1.5°C of warming. But it is at least far better than a 2°C rise within the next 20 years.

That extra half degree additional increase may sound relatively modest but the global effects on both ecosystems and humans would be profound. For example, at 1.5°C of warming 8 % of plants will lose their habitable area but this doubles to 16% at a 2°C rise. A 1.5°C rise is predicted to destroy 70% of the world’s coral reefs but a 2°C rise will wipe them out entirely.

You can read Simon’s full post on the Landmark blog page here. To read more blogs from Landmark, click here.