The friction you’ve stopped noticing

^{By Elizabeth Jarvis, Managing Director, OneSearch}

There’s a particular kind of underperformance that’s hard to see from the inside.

It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t cause a catastrophic failure that forces a reckoning. It just accumulates – quietly, consistently – until it becomes the background noise of your working day. And then you stop hearing it.

After more than three decades in property search, I’ve had countless conversations with conveyancers who, after switching providers, said something like:

“I didn’t realise how much energy I was spending managing around them until I didn’t have to anymore.”

That’s the friction you stop noticing. Not because it goes away – because you absorb it.

Why the worst underperformance is the hardest to spot.

The providers most likely to cost firms time and confidence aren’t usually the ones who make obvious mistakes. Those are easy to act on.

The harder cases are providers who are mostly fine, who deliver reliably most of the time, who respond when chased, who process what they’re asked to process, but who don’t do the things that would make your working life meaningfully easier.

They don’t flag when something in a result looks inconsistent. They don’t proactively suggest a more appropriate product when a transaction warrants it. They don’t reach out when they haven’t heard from you. They don’t have a person who knows your firm, your caseload, the particular pressures of your market.

None of those omissions look like failures on an invoice. They show up as friction, in the extra ten minutes here, the nagging uncertainty there, the occasional moment when you wish you had someone to call who knew the context.

A real example worth considering.

We see cases where planning history in a local authority search has been correctly recorded but attached to a different property. Same street name, same numbering format, different location within the same council area. The data itself is accurate. The connection isn’t.

To a provider processing at volume, this kind of inconsistency is far too easy to miss; to a conveyancer advising a client on the basis of that planning history, it can mean rework, delay, and a difficult conversation at exactly the wrong moment in a transaction.

The question isn’t whether your current provider has made this kind of error. It’s whether they have the processes in place to catch it before it reaches you… and whether you’d know either way.

The problem with “it’s fine.”

In busy practice, it’s fine is a completely rational response to a provider who isn’t actively causing problems. You have enough genuine fires to deal with without manufacturing concerns about something that’s mostly working.

But mostly working and working well are meaningfully different things.

The gap between them tends to widen gradually, in ways that are easy to miss until you step back and look at the whole picture.

When did you last actively think about whether your search provider is the right one? Not in response to a specific problem, but as a considered question in its own right?

For most firms, the honest answer is: not recently. Possibly not ever.

That’s not a criticism. It’s just the reality of how these relationships tend to work. You make a choice – based on a recommendation, a price point, or simple inertia from whoever the firm used before – and then you get on with the work.

Let’s set a new baseline for what you should expect.

Your provider should have a genuine understanding of your caseload – not a vague sense of what kind of firm you are, but a working knowledge of the transaction types you oversee regularly, the local authority areas you operate in, the complications you most commonly encounter.

They should be telling you things you didn’t ask, not just answering the questions you raise, and when something goes wrong – because it will, sometimes, in any complex data-driven process – they should be on it before you’ve had to chase.

Not because it looks good. Because your time is too valuable to spend following up on things that should already be resolved.

An honest five minutes

Rather than take my word for it, do your own assessment.

We’ve put together a short scorecard – eighteen questions across six categories – that gives you an honest picture of where your current provider stands. It takes about five minutes. There’s no obligation attached to the result.

If your provider is doing well across the board, you’ll have more confidence in that than you probably have right now. And if there are gaps, you’ll know where they are – which is always more useful than a vague sense that something isn’t quite right.

The friction you’ve stopped noticing is still there. The only question is whether it has to be.