What are property professionals’ top priorities for 2024?

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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.