Why does it take 70% longer to sell a UK home than a US home?

Digital property pack provider Moverly has analysed the average time it takes to sell a home in 12 countries - and guess who is at the bottom of the league table?

The analysis reveals that 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.

The fastest homeselling nation is, by far, the USA where it takes an average of just 53 days to go from listing to ‘closing’.

At the bottom of the table with easily the slowest selling process is the UK. It takes an average of 179 days - almost six months - to go from listing to completion. This is 70% longer than the USA, equivalent to a difference of 126 days.

Other nations to have fast selling processes include UAE (70 days), New Zealand (72 days), Canada (90 days), and Australia (95 days).

The nations where homeselling comes close to taking as long as it does in the UK are Italy (159 days), Spain (152 days), Portugal (152 days), and Singapore (152 days), while Germany (137 days), and France (105 days) sit middle of the table.

So why is the UK’s selling process so slow?

Gemma Young, chief executive of Moverly, suggests that the issues with the UK process are result of its unique idiosyncrasies ranging from archaic conveyancing practices to elongated windows in which buyers and sellers are legally allowed to change their minds and pull out of transactions.

“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” explains Young.

“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.”