Exchange time reaches 135 days
Property transactions slow as exchange time reaches 135 days — up 45% on 2019
The time it takes to exchange contracts has risen to 135 days — 45% longer than in 2019 and 3% higher than last year — despite a drop in property transactions year-on-year, it emerged today.
Novus Strategy, the transformation consultancy for the mortgage and home buying industry, said the figures highlighted the fact the industry has a configuration problem when it comes to technology, which goes beyond the simple adoption of digital solutions.
They identified the time to exchange had increased year-on-year despite fewer transactions. HMRC recorded 79,880 transactions at the end of January 2026, compared with 82,350 in 2025 — a drop of 3%.
Using data from property analytics firm TwentyCi, Novus found that the average time to exchange had risen 45%, from 93 days in 2019 to 135 days today, and by 3% in the last year from 131 days. Interestingly, transaction volumes in January 2019 were 78,830 — very similar to this year — yet the process was significantly faster.
The biggest increase in time to exchange was recorded in the £1m+ price bracket, a rise of 8% in just one year, increasing from 136 days to 146 days. At this higher end, transactions often involve more complex financing arrangements, additional legal scrutiny and longer chains, all of which can extend timelines.
‘Time to exchange’ excludes ‘time to sell’ — the period between a property being listed and reaching Sold Subject to Contract (SSTC) — which typically moves in line with market demand. This stood at 82 days in 2019, 83 days last year and is currently 86. This means in addition to the 135 days to exchange, the whole process now takes 221 days, or around seven months and two weeks.
Progress is underway as technology providers, government bodies such as the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT) and industry organisations including the Open Property Data Association (OPDA) work to create a more connected property ecosystem.
They are focused on enabling open data standards, trusted digital identities, reusable permissions, Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) and upfront property information to make transactions faster and more transparent. But those advances cannot be fully adopted and scaled without Horizontal Digital Integration (HDI), the operating model that lenders can use to reconfigure themselves internally and externally so that they can fully leverage these innovations. For lenders, HDI is what unlocks the fruits of interoperability across the wider ecosystem, namely improved speed-to-offer, speed-to-completion and reduced fall-throughs.
Claire Van der Zant, CEO at Novus Strategy, said:
“It’s disappointing to see that time to exchange is still rising, and this metric has been trending upwards for some time. It only confirms what we, and many others across the industry, have been saying for a long time, which is that the ecosystem remains too fragmented.
“All companies involved in the mortgage and residential sales market have faced increasing workload and regulatory obligations in recent years but technology has failed to keep pace.
“There is only so much efficiency to be gained from solutions that are not interoperable. There remains a huge amount of friction between these businesses when they need to coordinate and communicate with each other, in order to push a transaction forward. Data captured digitally in one organisation cannot easily be reused in the next, and what you end up with is a fragile digital journey even though individual solutions might be extremely powerful in isolation.
“This is precisely why the Government saw the need for significant reform of the home buying and selling process in last year’s consultation, and why the recommendations cannot come soon enough.
“Progress has been made by brokers, lenders and conveyancers but largely in isolation. Each part of the market has developed its own customer journeys and digital processes, so the challenge now is for the industry to connect those parts together through HDI, solving problems like trust, interoperability and liability simultaneously.”
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