The government’s proposals for overhauling the home buying process are noble on the surface as the current property system is totally broken, but in reality much of what’s being proposed has been tried before — and it failed.
Home Information Packs (HIPs) were all about getting key information together to speed up transactions and make everything more transparent roughly two decades ago, but then they fizzled out in 2010. The theory was great, the practice less so.
Housing Secretary, Steve Reed, rightly says that “buying a home should be a dream, not a nightmare”, but the real nightmare is the disconnected property market and getting so many moving parts to move as one to deliver better consumer outcomes.
Many have rightly said the devil will be in the detail, as this is only the first announcement after all. But as I see it the real devil will be in the implementation, specifically getting an enormous industry with so many cogs working together.
Too many grandiose plans have failed to survive contact with the UK’s property market so this one will need a monumental amount of effort to succeed given all the different stakeholders operating in it.
Thinking positively, AI and the huge strides the industry has made in technology may be able to make this next attempt the one that finally works.
But even if it does and people experience a new streamlined, cost-effective and transparent way of buying property, the elephant in the room remains the lack of homes being built.
Labour promised to build 1.5 new homes in the current parliament and time is running out. Without more homes, and fast, many will never be able to afford to benefit from a radical overhaul of the property market.
The government says its plans are the biggest shake-up to the homebuying system in this country’s history. If that’s really the case, the overhaul must also feature a shakedown of conditional selling, a controversial practice where an estate agent pressures or forces a buyer to use their in-house services, such as a mortgage broker or solicitor.
This is a rogue practice that FT Adviser, the leading title for intermediaries, is currently running a campaign about as it is rife and leads to poor consumer outcomes.
Until conditional selling is rooted out, outcomes for consumers are at risk of remaining poor, however streamlined and efficient the wider homebuying process may be. The Government 100% needs to ensure conditional selling is in its roadmap.