UK plans earlier binding home sales to cut delays and costs

Homebuyers who lose weeks to collapsed chains could face a very different process if ministers make sales legally binding much earlier and require sellers to hand over fuller information at the start. The government says the changes are designed to cut delays, reduce wasted costs and curb gazumping, where a seller accepts a higher offer before contracts are exchanged.

Under the proposals, binding conditional contracts would make deals enforceable sooner, potentially as soon as an offer is accepted, rather than leaving either side free to walk away until exchange. Sellers would also have to provide upfront property information in sales packs, a move ministers say should give buyers more certainty before they spend money on surveys, searches and legal fees.

The case for reform rests on a system the government describes as slow and expensive. It says the average home purchase takes about 120 days once an offer is accepted, transaction times have risen by 60% since 2007, and around one in three residential property transactions fail. Those failed deals cost buyers and sellers about £400m a year in wasted costs, according to the government, in a market that sees about 1.2 million residential property transactions annually and supports around £100bn of economic activity and 1.2 million jobs.

The consultation on home buying and selling reform ran from 6 October 2025 to 29 December 2025. In its announcement on 18 June 2026, the government said the package, which also includes digital tools, could cut buying times by around four weeks, save first-time buyers an average of £650 and halve the number of sales that fall through. Ministers said the reforms would be brought in by the end of Parliament, with a roadmap for next steps due later in the Parliament.

Industry reaction was broadly supportive, though not uncritical. Nationwide Building Society said it welcomed the proposals and called them a major milestone in simplifying and streamlining homebuying. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said the direction of travel was right and the current process in England and Wales was too slow, uncertain and prone to fall-throughs, but stressed that reform had to be backed by high-quality, professional upfront information. The Law Society has said it would not support binding contracts in the current conveyancing system until the wider process is reformed, while UK Finance said the plan offered a practical framework for reducing inefficiencies and transaction fall-through rates.

Scotland is often cited as the benchmark for reformers because contracts become binding earlier there through the missives process. For England and Wales, the political test is whether earlier commitment and better information will genuinely reduce broken chains, or simply move cost and risk to an earlier stage in the transaction.