Sales Progression: Why Property Sales Stall and How Technology Fixes It
Average conveyancing times have increased by 60% since 2007, rising from 75 days to 120.
Nearly £392 million in estate agency commission is lost every year to collapsed property sales in England.
Every year in England, more than 300,000 agreed property sales collapse before completion. For anyone working in sales progression, these numbers define the landscape. According to a HomeOwners Alliance survey, the average failed transaction costs the mover £2,727 in wasted legal fees, surveys, and mortgage costs, with one in ten losing more than £5,000. On the industry side, Rightmove’s analysis published earlier this year estimates that permanent fall-throughs cost estate agents nearly £392 million in lost commission annually.
Those figures only capture the sales that die outright. Rightmove’s data shows that while 6% of transactions collapse and never return to market, a further 23% temporarily fall through before eventually completing. That means almost one in three agreed sales hits serious trouble at some point between offer and completion. Scotland’s fall-through rate is significantly lower. The difference is not the people. It is the process.
Most sales progressors are managing that process from a spreadsheet and a phone. Sales progression is one of the few roles in property where the work is almost entirely invisible until something goes wrong: holding chains together, spotting problems before they become fall-throughs, keeping buyers and sellers calm enough to reach completion. Most of that is skill and judgement built over years. But a significant portion of it is also admin, and poorly supported admin at that.
Here are five of the most common problems it creates, and the technology that addresses each one.
1. You Find Out About Problems Too Late
By the time a sales progressor knows a file is in trouble, it has usually been in trouble for a while. A solicitor has been sitting on an enquiry for ten days. A buyer’s mortgage offer is about to expire. A search has come back with an issue nobody has flagged yet. The spreadsheet does not tell you any of this. It tells you what was last written in the notes column, which could be from last Tuesday.
The result is that most sales progression happens reactively. You find out something has stalled because a vendor rings to ask what is going on, not because your system flagged it.
Platforms like Alto and Street.co.uk address this directly. Both allow sales progressors to set milestone deadlines for each stage of a transaction, and both surface cases that have missed those deadlines automatically. Instead of mentally tracking fifteen files and hoping nothing slips, you open a dashboard and the problem cases are already identified. Alto groups files by conveyancer, which means you can also spot patterns: if the same solicitor’s files keep stalling at the same stage, that is visible data rather than a vague feeling.
2. Every Update Requires a Phone Call
A significant portion of a sales progressor’s day is spent telling people things they could be told automatically. Vendors want to know what is happening. Buyers want reassurance. Solicitors need to be chased for information they should have sent already. Each of those interactions is a phone call or an email, each of which needs to be logged, each of which takes time away from files that actually need active attention.
The problem is not that communication is unnecessary. It is that a lot of it is routine, and routine communication does not need a person to deliver it.
PropertyFile, built into Alto, gives buyers and sellers their own portal where they can see exactly where their transaction stands at any time. Street.co.uk does the same through its client-facing account system. When a milestone is completed, the relevant parties are notified automatically. The volume of inbound calls asking for updates drops, and the calls that do come in tend to be the ones that actually require a conversation. That shift frees up sales progression time for the files that genuinely need attention.
3. AML and Compliance Slow Everything Down at the Wrong Moment
Anti-money laundering checks, proof of funds, identity verification, and material information collection are all essential. They are also, in most agencies, handled reactively: the offer is accepted, the file is opened, and then someone starts chasing the buyer for documents they should have provided weeks ago. That chase takes time. The buyer is busy. The documents arrive in dribs and drabs. Meanwhile, the transaction cannot properly progress until compliance is signed off, and sales progression stalls while everyone waits.
According to research by Landmark Information Group and Ochresoft, the average time from conveyancer instruction to completion for purchase transactions has increased by around 60% since 2007, rising from 75 days to 120 days in 2024. Duplicative compliance checks across solicitors, lenders, and agents account for a meaningful share of that increase.
iamproperty’s movebutler addresses this by moving compliance to the front of the process. Buyers and sellers complete AML checks, identity verification, and material information digitally before or at the point of instruction, rather than after. The platform is used by more than 2,000 estate agency branches and saves around two hours of admin per transaction (based on a survey of 475 agents conducted by iamproperty). In a collaboration between iamproperty, Movera, and Connells Group, pairing conveyancers across firms on auction transactions and shifting compliance upfront brought the average time from receipt of the draft contract pack to completion down to 47 days across 614 cases. It is worth noting that this measures a different starting point to the national average. Landmark puts the typical instruction-to-completion time at 120 to 123 days. But the direction and scale of the improvement are significant.
Street.co.uk’s Buyer Ready tool works on the same principle, collecting proof of funds and solicitor details from buyers at the point of offer so that the transaction starts with the necessary information already in place rather than spending the first fortnight gathering it.
4. Title Issues Surface Too Late to Fix Without Killing the Deal
One of the most consistent causes of late-stage fall-throughs is a title problem that nobody looked for until the conveyancer found it at week eight or ten. Missing planning permissions, boundary disputes, restrictive covenants, rights of way that were never properly resolved: these are issues that have existed in the deeds for years, sometimes decades, and have no effect on a property until someone tries to sell it. At that point, they become a sales progression nightmare.
Finding out about a title defect at week ten, when the buyer has paid for a survey, the sellers have made plans to move, and the chain is counting on the exchange, is a very different situation to finding out at instruction. One is solvable. The other frequently is not.
Veya analyses title deeds at the point of instruction and produces a report identifying risks before conveyancing begins. The platform scans hundreds of data points on the title register, flags issues, suggests solutions, and assigns a complexity score so that agents and conveyancers can triage cases from the outset. One agency using Veya reported reducing its average time to sell from 14 weeks to nine weeks. Issues that would otherwise surface as nasty surprises mid-transaction are instead known quantities from day one, giving the sales progressor time to either resolve them or have an honest conversation with the vendor about what the transaction involves.
5. There Is Nothing Stopping a Buyer or Seller Walking Away
This is the problem that no amount of good sales progression can fully solve within the current legal framework, and it is worth understanding clearly. In England, an accepted offer carries no legal weight. Either party can withdraw at any point before exchange with no financial penalty whatsoever. A buyer who finds a better property, a seller who changes their mind, a chain member who gets cold feet after a bad week at work: none of them owe anyone anything until contracts are exchanged.
Scotland handles this differently through its missives system. When a buyer’s solicitor submits a formal offer and the seller’s solicitor accepts, concluding the missives, both parties are locked into a legally binding contract. Walking away after that point carries real financial consequences, including liability for the other party’s costs and potential court action. This earlier point of legal commitment is a significant part of why Scotland’s fall-through rate is substantially lower than England’s.
Gazeal’s Reservation Agreement is the closest available solution on the English market. When both parties sign up, they each make a financial commitment at offer stage rather than waiting for exchange. Crucially, neither side puts down a deposit. Instead, Gazeal provides a guarantee, backed by insurance, that a compensation payment will be made to the other party if someone withdraws without good reason. The commitment starts at £2,000 and can run to £100,000 depending on the transaction. This substantially changes the calculation for anyone thinking about walking away on a whim. The company has processed over £4 billion in property transactions through the model, and its own data suggests that reserving a sale reduces the fall-through rate from around 33% to approximately 6%.
It does not eliminate fall-throughs caused by genuine circumstances: survey problems, mortgage failures, or changes in personal situation. But it removes a large proportion of the discretionary withdrawals that a sales progressor currently has no tool to prevent.
None of these five problems are new, and sales progressors have been managing around them through skill and persistence for years. What technology changes is the infrastructure behind sales progression: less time spent on routine updates, earlier sight of problems, compliance handled upfront rather than chased mid-transaction, and title risks surfaced before they become deal-breakers.
The question worth asking is what the industry’s fall-through rate would look like if these tools were adopted at scale rather than by a minority of forward-thinking firms. Scotland’s system proves that earlier commitment and better process design produce measurably better outcomes. England has the technology to close that gap. It just has not yet decided to use it.
