Let’s be honest – moving home shouldn’t feel like dragging yourself through wet cement.

Yet in 2025, our industry still runs on a mixture of outdated systems, broken communication, and wishful thinking.

Buyers are anxious. Sellers are left second-guessing. And estate agents are stuck chasing updates from all directions, often with no real answers.

Somehow, this has become business as usual. It’s not just that the process is flawed – it’s that we’ve all learned to tolerate the chaos. To shrug off long timelines and lack of visibility. To tell clients, “That’s just how it works,” instead of asking why it still works this way at all.

And that’s the real issue. The property system isn’t broken because one part doesn’t function. It’s broken because no one’s taking responsibility for raising the bar.

Normalised silence

We need to talk about communication – or rather, the absence of it. Every day, I see buyers chasing agents, agents chasing conveyancers, and brokers chasing all of them. The client – the one person whose move this actually is – is left in the dark. Updates in the property industry are vague, timelines slip quietly, and silence becomes the norm.

That isn’t just frustrating. It’s damaging.

Stop treating updates as a courtesy and start treating communication as a core part of the service.”

The fix? We stop treating updates as a courtesy and start treating communication as a core part of the service. That means shared visibility across the chain – real-time tracking, proactive status updates, and yes, someone whose job it is to own the file.

Everyone’s involved

That’s another thing: no one owns the file. Everyone touches it, but no one leads it. The conveyancer focuses on their part. The agent is left to guess at progress. The broker might not even know if searches are back. And when no one sees the whole picture, no one can move the deal forward.

Every transaction needs someone empowered to chase, coordinate, unblock and deliver. Otherwise, things don’t just slow down – they stall entirely.

Service at scale?

Let’s not forget the issue that’s quietly eroding trust across the board: volume-based conveyancing. We’ve normalised cheap, slow, impersonal legal work so now, clients become case numbers, agents firefight and the race to the bottom on price leaves everyone losing out.

We need to stop rewarding firms for the number of files they open and start rewarding them for how well they handle them.”

We need to stop rewarding firms for the number of files they open and start rewarding them for how well they handle them. Service should matter. Speed should matter. Communication should matter. And when it does, fall-through rates drop, pipelines flow, and clients actually feel like someone’s on their side.

Higher standards

None of this is revolutionary. It’s just… common sense. But common sense doesn’t scale without commitment, and right now, the industry needs more of it. More leadership, more coordination and more people willing to say: “This isn’t good enough anymore.”

Because when this system works, it really works. Deals move fast. Clients feel looked after. And property industry professionals, for once, get to do their best work instead of constantly chasing their tails.

We don’t need to rip it all up and start again, we just need to stop accepting average. And that starts with asking more – of ourselves, and of each other.

Roxanne Barker is CEO of Fix My Legals, a firm aiming to revolutionise people’s experience of conveyancing so that the home moving journey is stress free and more enjoyable