Home buying journey is about to become unrecognisable
Claire Van der Zant, CEO of Novus Strategy, comments on the Government’s homebuying reform
“The industry has been very vocal in its demands for mandation and this is the most impactful example yet of government intervention that will drive the change everyone has been asking for. What it will mean is the complete reorganisation of the customer journey for those on both sides of each transaction from day one. It will be unrecognisable in the most exciting way.
“Sellers are desperate for more commitment and buyers will insist on more information up front, but you can’t have one without the other. That’s the central challenge. The entire industry needs to figure out how they will stop repeating each other’s work, and be part of a brave new world where information doesn’t arrive later than it should or get stuck in a way that creates delay. If you front load everything, the waterfall process we have at the moment vanishes, and fall-throughs with it.
“Only then will buyers have enough upfront information about a property to make an earlier, binding commitment. Without that, they’re not going to take the purchase risk if they don’t know what they’re committing to. It’s for this reason that reservation agreements today are few and far between.
“Work to make sure information flows across organisational boundaries has already started with various public and private sector initiatives trialling what a new world based on transparency and readily-available data might look like. What the Government’s intervention now signals is a recognition of the role it must play when change on this scale is required and confirmation that this is the right direction.
“We’re not yet in a world where government is mandating how these requirements will be met exactly. It will be shaped by departments like DBT around Smart Data, but they’re using their influence to create clear expectations that will ultimately unblock delays and fall throughs at critical points in the process.
“The four-week acceleration in completion times promises to be transformational but, if anything, the reforms could have an even bigger impact than that.”
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