Landmark Information Group has today published Property Transaction Reform: What the Market Wants Next, its 2026 research into residential property transactions.

It includes insights from 250 property professionals, including 100 residential conveyancers, and 500 home movers who had bought and/or sold in the last 18 months. The research took place in August 2026 as the sector began preparing for the Government’s Home Buying and Selling Reform roadmap, published in June.

Their answers show a profession seeing real progress, while still carrying a heavy load.

Fewer additional enquiries, less chasing

The average proportion of cases needing additional enquiries, because of missing, incomplete or inaccurate upfront information, has fallen from 51% in 2024 to 43% in 2025 and 33% in 2026.

Time spent chasing is down too. Conveyancers estimate they now spend 34% of their working day chasing other parties or responding to requests for updates, compared with 41% in 2025.

Liz Jarvis, Managing Director of OneSearch, said: “The fall in additional enquiries is a meaningful improvement. But the reality is that a considerable proportion of cases still need more questioning, and spending around a third of your working day chasing is still significant.”

Earlier information is seen as the answer

More than three quarters of conveyancers (77%) identified at least one improvement to upfront information and data readiness that could improve productivity and business success.

Their clients point the same way. 95% of home movers surveyed agreed that having key property information available at the point of listing would make moving less stressful.

Ready for reform, waiting for clarity

Most conveyancers (81%) believe meaningful reform of the home buying process is long overdue, and 72% expect significant or moderate operational change from preparing for earlier buyer and seller commitment.

Fewer feel ready to act on it. Only 64% agree there is enough clarity in the roadmap to start considering the changes required.

“Firms need more clarity about the information they require” Liz added. “This includes when it needs to become available and, really importantly, how it’s going to move between the different parties. The more certainty they have around those requirements, the better placed they’ll be to look at their current processes and where they need to be.”

What the report recommends

The report sets out four priorities for a more connected transaction: closing the upfront information gap, mitigating unexpected issues, reducing chasing, and connecting the market through better information sharing and communication.

To explore the findings in full, download Property Transaction Reform: What the Market Wants Next.

Landmark’s latest Residential Property Trends Report is now available, featuring the most recent data on listings, sold subject to contract / sold subject to missives, search orders and completion volumes across England, Wales and Scotland.

Our Q3 2026 analysis shows residential markets remained subdued, with supply holding relatively steady in England and Wales while demand, searches and completions continued to track below last year’s levels. In Scotland, listings, searches and completions also remained down year-on-year. 

Across both markets, affordability pressures and wider uncertainty continue to hold back progress. Here are our headline findings across England and Wales:

  • Listing volumes in Q3 2026 were down 2% compared to Q3 2025. 
  • SSTC volumes in Q3 2026 were down 11% compared to Q3 2025. 
  • Search order volumes were down 12% in Q3 2026 vs Q3 2025 
  • Completion volumes were down 7% in Q3 2026 vs Q3 2025.  

Click below to view the full reports and explore what the latest data tells us about the market.  

HS2’s 2026 reset has moved the dates, the top speed and the map. Here’s what that means for conveyancers acting on properties near the route.

If the latest estimates hold, the first HS2 passenger train won’t leave Old Oak Common until some time between 2036 and 2039. For conveyancers, though, the railway has been live for years. Safeguarding, blight, construction and property sales all show up in transactions now, and the picture changed again in 2026.

What is HS2 now?

HS2 is a new high-speed railway between London Euston and Birmingham Curzon Street, with a connection to the West Coast Main Line at Handsacre Junction in Staffordshire so that services can carry on to the North West and Scotland.

The northern legs were cancelled in two stages: the eastern leg to Leeds in 2021, and the route from Birmingham to Manchester in October 2023. What’s being built today is the line once known as Phase 1.

What changed in 2026?

In May 2026 the Transport Secretary published the results of the programme reset led by HS2 Ltd’s chief executive, Mark Wild, in the government’s latest report to Parliament. The headline numbers:

  • an expected cost of £87.7 billion to £102.7 billion
  • first trains between Old Oak Common and Birmingham Curzon Street between May 2036 and October 2039
  • the full scheme, including Euston and the Handsacre connection, between May 2040 and December 2043
  • a top speed of up to 320km/h (just under 200mph) instead of the planned 360km/h, adding around three minutes to a London to Birmingham journey

The final stages of the reset are expected to finish in the first half of 2027, with a full delivery baseline to follow, so it’s safest to treat every date as a range rather than a promise.

Where does safeguarding stand along the old route?

It depends which section the property sits on, and the four sections now tell four different stories.

  • London to the West Midlands: construction is underway and safeguarding remains in place. HS2 Ltd has also started marketing surplus properties along this stretch, so former HS2 homes are beginning to come back onto the market.
  • West Midlands to Crewe (the former Phase 2a): safeguarding was lifted across most of the route in January 2024, and the compulsory purchase powers expired on 11 February 2026. The government is keeping the land it has already bought, though, because it intends to build a new Birmingham to Manchester line in the long term. It has been clear that this won’t be a revival of HS2, and no specification or timetable has been set.
  • West Midlands to Leeds (the former eastern leg): safeguarding was lifted in July 2025 and a programme to sell 558 properties is under way, with open market sales expected later in 2026. Under the Crichel Down Rules, former owners whose properties were bought under statutory blight or compulsory purchase get the first chance to buy them back at current market value.
  • Crewe to Manchester (the former western leg): in January 2026 the government confirmed that the section into Manchester, via the airport, will become part of Northern Powerhouse Rail.

Why does HS2 matter in a transaction?

Inside safeguarded areas, owners may be able to serve a blight notice, and land needed for the railway can be acquired through compulsory purchase. Outside them, proximity to the route can still affect value and saleability through construction traffic, noise and vibration, and the general uncertainty that a project of this size brings.

The new timetable matters here too. With opening pushed back, construction impacts will be felt by communities along the line for longer than buyers may expect, and lenders may take a closer look at properties near the route.

There’s also a newer scenario: buying a property that HS2 once owned. Some of these homes have stood empty or been let on short tenancies for years, so a full survey is sensible, and the buyer’s conveyancer will want to understand any Crichel Down offer-back history and what was acquired, released or retained.

What will the CON29 tell you?

CON29 question 3.5 asks whether the property is, or will be, within 200 metres of the centre line of a proposed railway, tramway, light railway or monorail, and whether there are any rail proposals within the local authority’s boundary. We cover how it works in Five Minutes On… Road and Rail Schemes.

For a project of HS2’s scale, 200 metres is a narrow view. Noise, vibration, construction disruption and blight can reach further, and the CON29 won’t tell you about safeguarding history on cancelled sections or properties being sold off. That’s why a dedicated HS2 search is often worth adding anywhere near the line. It will typically confirm:

  • the nearest distance between the property and the route
  • the maximum train speed at the nearest point, which is relevant to noise
  • whether the property falls within a safeguarded area or compensation zone
  • any property schemes or compensation the owner may be entitled to
  • construction timelines for the local area

Which areas are affected?

The line under construction runs from Camden and Ealing in London, through Hillingdon, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, West Northamptonshire and Warwickshire, to Solihull, Birmingham and Lichfield in Staffordshire. For a property-level view, the HS2 interactive map is the quickest place to start.

Along the cancelled sections, the direct property scheme questions have mostly fallen away, but residual blight, retained land near Crewe and the eastern leg disposals mean HS2 can still come up in places where no train will ever run.

Start every HS2 question by establishing which section the property sits on. A house in Buckinghamshire, one near Crewe and one on the former eastern leg now raise three quite different sets of issues, from live construction and compensation to retained land and Crichel Down buy-backs.

The first passenger may still be a decade away, but HS2 has been part of the conveyancing file for years, and on the current timetable it will be staying there for a good while yet.

Of all the risks conveyancers deal with, Friday afternoon fraud is one of the most damaging. It does not rely on a defect in title or a missed search result. It relies on a single email arriving at the right moment with the wrong bank details.

Here is how it works, why the name undersells it, and what firms can do to stop it.

What is Friday afternoon fraud?

It is a form of payment diversion fraud. Criminals intercept and redirect legitimate property purchase funds by impersonating solicitors, estate agents or buyers. The aim is simple: persuade someone to send a deposit, completion monies or sale proceeds to an account the fraudster controls.

The numbers show why it persists. Between April 2024 and March 2025, 143 cases of conveyancing fraud were reported to Action Fraud, with losses of £11.7 million. The average loss was around £82,000, and victims were noticeably younger than for many frauds, with 32% aged 40–49 and 27% aged 30–39. For a first-time buyer, that is often everything they have saved.

Why Friday, and why does the name undersell it?

The name comes from timing. Completions often happen on a Friday, and the weekend buys criminals time to avoid detection. By the time anyone notices on Monday, the money has usually been moved on.

The name is also a little misleading, because it can happen on any day. The real pattern is not the day of the week. The scams are timed for the final stages of a transaction, when large sums are expected to move quickly. That can mean exchange, a deposit request or the release of sale proceeds, as well as completion.

How does the attack work?

There are two common routes. The fraudster either takes over a genuine email account or spoofs one with a lookalike domain, then sends “updated” bank details. A hijacked account is the more dangerous of the two, because the email really does come from the right address.

Compromised mailboxes are rarely used straight away. The fraudster will often read along for weeks, learning the matter, the names involved and the tone of the correspondence. The fake request then arrives at exactly the point a client is expecting to pay.

The weak point is not always the firm. Sometimes the solicitor has been hacked, but often the homebuyer has fallen for a phishing attack. That is why client education matters as much as internal security.

What are the warning signs?

Most fraudulent requests share a few features:

  • Bank details that change, or arrive for the first time, late in the transaction.
  • Small alterations to names, email addresses or company details, such as ‘m’ swapped for ‘rn’.
  • A reply-to address that differs from the sender address.
  • Pressure to pay quickly, often with a warning that any delay will cost the client the property.
  • An account name or bank that does not fit the firm.

None of these is conclusive on its own. Together, they are a reason to stop and check.

What should firms have in place?

The most effective control is a simple rule: bank details are never changed by email. Give clients the firm’s account details at the start, in the client care letter and ideally by a second route. Tell them plainly that the firm will never change them by email.

The NCA and Law Society guidance for property transactions comes down to three steps. Call before transferring money, because emails can be intercepted. Send a small test sum and confirm it has arrived. Do not transfer anything until you are satisfied the details are correct. The call has to go to a number already held on file, never one given in the suspicious email.

Beyond that, firms can:

  • Use multi-factor authentication on every mailbox.
  • Train staff to treat any change of payment details as a potential fraud until proven otherwise.
  • Put a fraud warning in email signatures and client care letters.
  • Use Confirmation of Payee checks as an extra layer, but not as the only one.

The same discipline applies in the other direction. When a seller client emails asking for proceeds to go to a new account, it deserves the same scrutiny as a buyer being asked to pay.

What happens if money goes to the wrong account?

Speed is everything. Contact the sending bank immediately, because the chances of recovery fall with every hour. The incident should also be reported to the national fraud reporting service.

Firms have regulatory duties too. In one case, an experienced solicitor was fined £10,000 and ordered to pay £16,000 in costs after being tricked into transferring more than £290,000 to a hacker. There was no dishonesty, but the SRA expects such cases to be reported, even where the stolen money has been replaced.

Friday afternoon fraud succeeds because it exploits the moment a transaction is most exposed: large sums, tight deadlines and clients who are expecting to pay. The technology behind it can be sophisticated, but the defence is not. A clear rule that bank details are never changed by email, backed by a phone call to a known number, stops most attacks.

The firms that avoid losses are rarely the ones with the most advanced systems. They are the ones where every member of staff, and every client, knows to stop when payment details change and to check before anything moves.

National Customer Service Week often focuses on the visible side of service: responding quickly, solving problems, and supporting customers when they need help.

But today’s theme, Service Culture to Improve Productivity, highlights something less obvious.

Productivity isn’t only about doing more in less time; it’s about removing the small points of friction that slow people down every day, and the challenge with friction is that it rarely announces itself.

The ‘it’s fine’ conundrum

A few months back, OneSearch Managing Director Liz Jarvis wrote about the kind of operational friction that becomes part of the working day without anyone really noticing.

The extra email you always have to send. The process that takes three steps when it should take one. The recurring issue you’ve experienced often enough that you’ve stopped expecting it to improve.

As Liz observed, these frustrations build up until they become background noise. For conveyancers, that’s an especially familiar experience. Transactions already involve enough moving parts, deadlines and competing priorities without stopping to question every small niggle. When something is mostly working, it’s often easier to work around it than challenge it.

The problem is that every workaround comes at a cost. Not necessarily a dramatic one – more often it’s measured in minutes rather than hours. But when those minutes are repeated hundreds or thousands of times across a year, they become something far more significant: a real drain on productivity.

Why service culture matters

This is where service culture enters the conversation. A strong service culture isn’t simply about being helpful, friendly or responsive, important though those things are.

At its best, service culture creates an environment where identifying and removing friction becomes everyone’s responsibility.

It encourages organisations to ask:

  • What’s making life harder for our customers?
  • Where are people spending time unnecessarily?
  • Which recurring frustrations have become accepted as “just the way things are”?

Those questions matter because productivity and customer experience are more closely linked than we often realise. When customers encounter fewer obstacles, they spend less time chasing updates, clarifying information or correcting avoidable issues. When teams understand where friction exists, they spend less time firefighting and more time delivering value.

The result isn’t just a better customer experience; it’s a more productive organisation.

The role of feedback

Of course, there’s one obvious challenge: you can’t fix the friction you don’t know exists. That’s why feedback is far more valuable than many organisations give it credit for.

Done properly, feedback isn’t a box-ticking exercise or a collection of compliments and complaints – it’s operational intelligence. It helps identify recurring bottlenecks before they become accepted practice. It reveals the gaps between how a process was designed to work and how customers actually experience it.

Most importantly, it helps organisations replace assumptions with evidence.

Why we opened a direct line

This summer, OneSearch launched a dedicated feedback channel for customers. The aim wasn’t simply to collect comments for a testimonial page or customer story. It was to create a direct route for customers to tell us where we’re getting things right and, just as importantly, where we’re creating unnecessary effort. Every submission is reviewed by our customer service team, led by Carol Dodd, because meaningful feedback deserves meaningful attention.

We’re still at the beginning of that journey, but we’re already convinced of one thing: the organisations that improve most consistently aren’t always the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated systems. They’re the ones that listen, learn and act.

A quick favour

If you’ve placed an order with OneSearch recently, we’d genuinely value your thoughts. Whether it’s turnaround times, communication, ease of use or something else entirely, every comment helps us build a clearer picture of where friction exists and where improvements can be made.

Because the goal isn’t simply better feedback – it’s better outcomes.

And as National Customer Service Week reminds us, better outcomes are often the result of a culture that listens, learns and continuously improves.

Landmark’s latest market research suggests the industry’s biggest challenge is no longer access to climate risk data, but interpreting it.

With 90% of conveyancers saying they would act sooner if climate information was easier to access and interpret, the opportunity is not more data, but helping professionals understand what matters, what it means and what happens next.

Key research takeaways

  • Climate risk is now considered as important as other mainstream due diligence checks by 82% of conveyancers.
  • 90% of conveyancers would act sooner if information was easier to access and interpret.
  • Research suggests the next challenge is helping conveyancers interpret which risks matter, what they mean and what action they should advise.

Why more climate data doesn’t automatically create better decisions

As climate risk gains prominence, conveyancers often find themselves navigating an expanding range of datasets, reports and risk indicators. Yet, more information is not always synonymous with greater confidence.

Eighty per cent of conveyancers said that their organisation feels confident explaining what climate risk information does and doesn’t mean for a property. However, significant challenges remain around regulation, responsibility and consistent interpretation across the sector.

This suggests the conveyancing industry’s next challenge may not be information availability, but information relevance. “Conveyancers are busy people,” explains Elizabeth Jarvis, Managing Director at OneSearch. “They don’t necessarily need more data. They need confidence that they’re focusing on the information most relevant to the decision in front of them.”

Whether considering flood exposure, ground stability, heat stress or energy performance, understanding how different factors connect and which are most material can often be more valuable than simply receiving additional information.

Climate awareness is no longer the problem

Sixty per cent of conveyancers have seen increasing client concern around climate change over the past year, while more than four in five (82%) now view climate risk information as becoming as important as other mainstream due diligence checks.

For Elizabeth, this reflects a broader shift in market maturity. “Most conveyancers now recognise that climate considerations form part of the wider due diligence picture,” says Elizabeth. “The challenge is no longer building awareness. It’s helping people understand what information is relevant, what it means in context and how it should influence decision-making.”

Why interpretation is becoming as important as information

One of the most striking findings from the research is that 90% of conveyancers say they would act sooner if climate information was easier to access and interpret. At the same time, 80% believe climate risks are still being identified too late to prevent disruption in many transactions.

These results point to an important distinction. Access to data alone does not automatically lead to action. Identifying a potential climate-related risk is often only the beginning of a much wider process. Conveyancers still need to determine how relevant the finding is to a specific property, what level of concern it may warrant and whether any further investigation may be appropriate.

“A climate alert on its own rarely provides a complete picture,” says Elizabeth. “Conveyancers need help assessing the significance of that finding within the context of the property, the transaction and the decision they’re trying to make. That’s where interpretation becomes incredibly important.”

Download the report

Landmark’s latest market research report, Climate change in the property sector 2026, explores how conveyancers, estate agents and mortgage lenders are responding to climate risk, where the biggest challenges remain and why interpretation is becoming just as important as climate risk data itself.

The findings suggest the industry’s next phase of maturity will not be defined by access to more data, but by helping professionals focus on what matters, understand it in context and apply it with confidence.

Download the report to explore the full findings and discover why clearer, more interpretable climate insight could be one of the property sector’s biggest opportunities.