Buying or selling a home should be one of life’s great milestones.

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At the moment, it’s anything but.

For too long, people have had to navigate a system where they’re left in the dark and everyone else seems to know more than they do.

You’ve got estate agents sitting on information about a property’s true condition. Conveyancing that still relies heavily on paper processes that feel as if they belong in 1987. And governments that had the chance to move to a modern system years ago but didn’t. The legal framework to support digital conveyancing has been there since 2002 – it just hasn’t been used.

Given all this, it isn’t hard to see why it now takes around 120 days, on average, to buy a property – and why one in three sales falls apart along the way.

Behind those numbers are the stories of real people: buyers and sellers who have saved for years, made plans around schools and jobs, only to see everything unravel.

We can and we will do better to change the system.

Because we want people to go into the biggest financial decision of their lives with their eyes open, not their fingers........

© LBC