New market insight from Moverly has revealed our county’s ability to sell homes is the slowest among 12 nations.
To conduct their research, Moverly – an organisation that works alongside estate agents to help speed up the sale of homes – compared the rate at which homes sell in the UK compared to 12 other countries, which include France, the USA and Germany.
The organisation found across the 12 nations; it takes an average 110 days for a property to go from its initial listing all the way through to completion.
Experts revealed the fastest home selling nation, by a mile, is America. Here, a home can go from a listing to closing the deal within just 53 days.
However, unfortunately for the UK, they were found to have the slowest rate – it takes around 179 days (almost half a year) for a property to go from a listing to completion.
It’s safe to safe the process in this country is worrying, although instead of just being concerned about the problem, Gemma Young, CEO of Moverly, has offered advice about how the procedure can be sped up.
‘It seems you have to move halfway around the world to access a decent home selling process. The Americans are showing the rest of the world up while the UK is making everyone else look very good! That’s not to say the US model is better, but it’s certainly much faster and we should be doing everything we can to speed up what has become a painfully sluggish journey here in the UK,’ Young said.
‘Conveyancing is a definite culprit when it comes to delaying the selling process, and this is because too many of the legal processes that pave the way to exchange of contracts have remained unchanged for decades, if not longer. By simply streamlining and digitising many of the conveyancing processes, we have proven that the time to sell can be reduced from up to 70%, which means the UK is perfectly capable of matching the speed of the US market. As more and more agents and conveyancers adopt the tech solutions that are now widely available to them, we expect the UK’s performance to see radical improvement in a short period of time.’
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