Will labour enforce the biggest changes to the home buying process in recent history?

By Jennifer Swinstead

Our Director Jennifer explains further.  

The property market has always been a ‘formal’ trust system, practically on a handshake if you will, all we need is the Anti Money Laundering, know your customer check and a complete chain with instructed solicitors to agree to take a property off the market SSTC.   

Labour’s housing reforms, together with new legislation, are pushing for tougher rules, to speed up the conveyance process and give any potential buyer due diligence before agreeing to go place an offer on a property. So, what’s the proposed changes? 

Labours proposal suggests a search pack paid for by the seller for perusal of the buyer upfront, when in standard practice this is currently paid for by the buyer usually after they’ve gone to sale agreed and, in some cases, after a survey has deemed the property worth its value.  

Secondly, they want listing information to include the fixed costs of the property where necessary i.e; service/ground rent, the tenure, length of lease, the council tax band and EPC rating also to become mandatory. Most agents worth their salt already include these kinds of important property information details in their particulars. However, for those that don’t, it would certainly save potential buyers time if they had all the information at the outset. This part of the legislation change can only be a good move.  

Let’s look again at the upfront search information they’re planning on including, for those of you of a certain age this will probably be ringing some bells from the dark days of the ‘homebuyers information pack’, which brough the market to a complete standstill until was eventually scarped in 2010 by the coalition government.  

Do searches upfront help the speed and security of the sale? Well yes, kind of, certainty in flood risk areas or on land used for mining.  There are however many repercussions for a scheme like this, which unsurprisingly seem to have completely evaded labour.  Firstly, it’s a cash cow for agents. There are already agents pushing this upfront cost to their sellers as a upsell on their overall income from the transaction. These are being charged to sellers upfront from £600-£1000 when a search pack applied for by your conveyancer is circa £300 for the buyer. 

The buyer still may have to purchase their own set of searches as not all solicitors will accept search packs not compiled by themselves. It’s a legal minefield.  

The most important information a buyer needs are the results of a survey. We all need to know if a property is structurally sound before completing on the purchase and it’s it’s not, the cost of the search pack has been vein.  

The third proposed ‘shake up’ is to Implement stricter codes off practice for estate agents and possibly including mandatory training towards a qualification before you can enter the sector. Personally, I’ve always thought this was something missing in the Uk industry that needed to be addressed. Theres so much miss information out there and agents are the product of their in-house training, rolled down from their seniors, its sometimes-perpetual rolling down of wrong information. For instance, have you ever heard an estate agent tell you that its illegal for them to tell you what another person has offered on a property? I hear this all the time from agents, it’s an old age traditional agent term, which seems to have just stuck, however it’s completely untrue. 

All in all, we will have to wait and see, hopefully they’ll stop in their tracks and take a second to realise every action has a knock-on effect somewhere. Personally, I do not think search packs upfront are the way to go. I do agree with agents being compliant and full property information on the listing as standard. Anything that is known but omitted from the listing by the seller or agent already is covered by the: 

 Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCCA) which prohibits misleading actions and omissions that could influence a consumer's transactional decision, including issues with property descriptions, photographs, and pricing. I would prefer to see more enforcement of this existing legislation.