Six in 10 Home Sales Now Take Over Six Months to Exchange

By Lisa Hayes · 22 August 2026

New data from TwentyEA shows that 60.8% of UK property transactions now take longer than six months to reach exchange of contracts — up from just 36% in 2019. Because most local authority searches are only valid for six months, that means three out of five sales are at risk of having their legal paperwork go stale mid-transaction, forcing sellers and buyers to pay for fresh searches or indemnity insurance before a lender will release the money.

Put simply: the market hasn't got slower at finding you a buyer. It's got dramatically slower at getting that buyer over the line. And that gap is where sales die.

What exactly did TwentyEA find?

The findings come from TwentyEA's latest Property & Homemover Report covering the second quarter of 2026, reported on 20 August. The headline number is blunt. More than 60% of property transactions are taking longer than six months to get from a sale being agreed to contracts being exchanged.

That figure was 36% in 2019. It is 60.8% so far this year. In seven years, the proportion of sales dragging past the half-year mark has gone up by two-thirds.

Nationally, TwentyCi calculates that buying a home now takes around seven months on average, start to finish. In 2019 it was 5.5 months. An extra six weeks doesn't sound catastrophic written down. Live through it — with a removal firm on hold, a nursery place hanging in the balance and a mortgage offer ticking down — and it feels considerably worse than six weeks.

• 60.8%of sales now take over six months to exchange
• 36%the equivalent figure in 2019
• 7 monthsaverage time to buy a home in 2026
• 2.5 monthstime to find a buyer — unchanged since 2019

Why does a six-month search deadline matter so much?

This is the part most sellers have never had to think about, because until recently it rarely bit.

When you sell a home, your buyer's conveyancer orders a set of searches: local authority, drainage and water, environmental, and often a mining or chancel check depending on where you live. These reveal planning applications next door, whether the road is adopted, flood risk, contaminated land, and so on. They are not optional if there's a mortgage involved.

Searches are a snapshot in time, and lenders treat them as perishable. Most are considered valid for six months. Once they're past that, a lender will typically refuse to release mortgage funds until they are refreshed or a suitable search indemnity insurance policy is put in place. TwentyEA makes that point explicitly, and it's the reason this statistic isn't just an interesting number for industry types.

If your sale creeps past the six-month mark — and on current figures, three out of five do — someone has to pay to redo the work, or insure around it. That's usually a few hundred pounds and, more painfully, another two to six weeks of waiting for a council to respond. Some local authorities turn searches around in days. Others take the better part of two months.

The kicker is that this often lands at exactly the worst moment: when everyone in the chain is finally ready, and one refreshed search throws up something new that gives a nervous buyer a reason to walk.

The six-month validity issue was one of the specific concerns raised by respondents to the Government's Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap, published in June. So it's on the radar in Whitehall. It just isn't fixed yet.

Where has the extra time actually gone?

Here's the detail that should reframe how you think about selling in 2026.

The marketing stage — from listing your home to agreeing a sale — takes around 2.5 months. That is the same as 2019. Agents are still finding buyers at roughly the pace they always did. Every bit of the slowdown has happened after the "Sold Subject to Contract" board goes up.

Stage of the sale	2019	2026	Change
Listing to sale agreed	~2.5 months	~2.5 months	No change
Sale agreed to exchange	~3 months	~4.5 months	+1.5 months
Whole journey	5.5 months	~7 months	+1.5 months
Share exceeding 6 months to exchange	36%	60.8%	+24.8 points

Source: TwentyEA / TwentyCi Property & Homemover Report, Q2 2026.

This matters because of where sellers put their energy. Most of us obsess over the listing: the photos, the asking price, which agent, whether to repaint the hallway. All of that is worth doing. But the data says the risk isn't in the shop window. It's in the conveyancing.

You can do everything right, get an offer in four weeks at a good price, and still be sitting in limbo the following spring wondering whether your buyer's lender will re-offer.

Why has the exchange stage got so much worse?

Several things have piled up at once, and none of them are going away quickly.

Conveyancing capacity. There are too few qualified conveyancers handling too many files. Case loads are high, staff turnover is high, and a single unresponsive firm anywhere in a chain sets the pace for everyone in it.

Lending has become fussier and more volatile. Quick Move Now's Q2 2026 data found that a third (33%) of failed sales collapsed because a buyer was refused a mortgage or their lending fell through. Mortgage offers usually last three to six months. When the underlying process routinely runs longer than that, offers expire and have to be re-applied for — at whatever rates and criteria apply on the day, not the day the buyer first offered.

Rates have been anything but calm. Nick Huntley, Director of TwentyEA, put it plainly: "So far this year we've seen a frenetic mortgage market as swap rates surged following the war in Iran." Every lurch in swap rates means re-pricing, re-offers and re-affordability checks. Every one of those adds days. You can follow the running picture in our coverage of UK house prices and market data.

Surveys are being used as a negotiating weapon. Quick Move Now put survey issues behind 27% of Q2 fall-throughs — the second-biggest cause, driven either by physical defects or by a surveyor valuing the property below the agreed price. In a market where asking prices have run ahead of independent valuations, down-valuations are more likely, not less.

Chains are longer and more fragile. Chain breaks and buyers' circumstances changing accounted for 13% each in the same dataset, with legal issues another 13%. Danny Luke, Quick Move Now's chief executive, noted that collapsed sales right now are "predominantly driven by structural fundamentals rather than buyer hesitation" — the problems are with lending criteria and survey valuations, not cold feet.

That's an important distinction. Your buyer probably does want your house. The system just keeps finding ways to stop them completing on it.

What's happening to buyers and sellers behind the headline?

The same TwentyEA report gives the supply and demand picture, and it isn't flattering for sellers.

Properties coming to market are up 2.4% year-on-year to 1,109,403. Demand is down 5.1% compared with 2025, at 736,108. More homes, fewer buyers. That's roughly three homes for every two buyers, and demand has fallen across every price band and every British region, with inner London hit hardest.

By property type, sales of flats are down 9.1% annually, semi-detached purchases down 4.6% and detached homes down 4.3%.

• 1,109,403homes listed, up 2.4% year-on-year
• 736,108buyers in the market, down 5.1%
• -9.1%fall in flat sales year-on-year
• 3.75%Bank of England base rate

There's a genuine piece of context worth holding onto, though, and Huntley makes it: demand is still higher today than it was in 2019 across all those property types. This isn't 2008. It's a market with plenty of willing buyers and a plumbing problem.

On price cutting, the report found price changes broadly static year-on-year, up just 0.1%. The interesting split is by value: reductions have risen most in the under-£200,000 bracket and fallen by more than 5% in the £1m-plus bracket. That's not because prime homes are flying — it's more likely that at the top end, sellers are quietly withdrawing rather than discounting, particularly with Mansion Tax changes hanging over the Budget.

What does this mean if you're selling right now?

Three practical consequences, and they compound.

First, your timeline planning is probably wrong. If you're budgeting on a three-month completion because that's what it took last time you moved, you're planning against a 2019 market. Assume six to seven months from listing to keys, and treat anything faster as a bonus. That changes when you hand in notice on a rental, when you accept a job in another city, and whether you can realistically complete before a probate deadline or a Budget date.

Second, your buyer's ability to complete matters as much as their offer. A £5,000-higher offer from someone with a mortgage in principle from a slow lender, at the top of their affordability, in a four-link chain, is worth considerably less than a slightly lower offer from a proceedable buyer. That's not agent-speak. With a third of failed sales dying on lending, buyer quality is the single biggest predictor of whether you actually move.

Third, delay costs money in ways nobody quotes you upfront. Refreshed searches. Indemnity policies. A second valuation fee. Mortgage product fees if the offer lapses and rates have moved. Extra months of a mortgage you were trying to escape, or of paying insurance and council tax on an empty inherited property.

What should you actually do about it?

You can't fix the conveyancing industry. You can shorten your own transaction, and most sellers leave a lot on the table here.

Get your paperwork ready before you list, not after you accept. Title deeds, the TA6 and TA10 forms, FENSA certificates for windows, building regulations sign-off and guarantees for any extension, boiler service records, the electrical certificate, planning permissions, any indemnity policies you inherited when you bought. Leasehold sellers should order the management pack early — freeholder packs are a notorious four-to-six-week stall. Doing this in the fortnight before you go live can pull weeks out of the back end.

Instruct your conveyancer at listing, not at offer. Choose one, complete the ID checks, sign the terms of business and get the file opened. When an offer lands you want to be starting from a running position.

Interrogate every offer. Ask for the mortgage in principle and who it's with. Ask what deposit they have and where it is. Ask how many links are in the chain above and below. Ask whether a broker has checked affordability at current rates, not February's. Ask if their own sale has exchanged. A good agent does all of this; make sure yours has.

Chase weekly, in writing. The single biggest cause of drift is that nobody is applying pressure. A short weekly email to your conveyancer asking exactly what they're waiting for, from whom, and when they last chased, does more than any amount of hoping.

Know your search expiry date. Note the date the buyer's searches were returned and diary six months from it. If you're within four weeks of that date and no exchange is in sight, raise indemnity insurance with your conveyancer before it becomes a crisis.

Price so the survey doesn't kill you. Down-valuations happen when the agreed price outruns what a surveyor can evidence from comparable sales. If you don't know what your home is genuinely worth against recent local completions rather than optimistic listings, start with an honest look at how much your house is worth before you set an asking price you'll only have to defend later.

If the terminology in your conveyancer's emails is slowing you down, our property jargon explained guide covers the ones that matter.

When does it make sense to skip the chain entirely?

For most people, the open market is the right answer. You'll usually achieve the highest price, and if you can absorb a seven-month timeline, that's the trade to make.

But not everyone can absorb it. The situations where the maths flips are specific and worth naming:

• Probate sales where an empty property is costing insurance, council tax and maintenance every month it sits.
• Divorce and separation, where a certain date matters more than the last few thousand pounds.
• Relocation or a job start date that won't wait for a chain of five to align.
• Repossession risk, where a fixed completion date is the entire point.
• Properties with issues — short lease, non-standard construction, subsidence history, cladding — that are difficult to mortgage, and where a lending-driven fall-through isn't a risk but a near-certainty.
• You've already been let down once and can't face restarting a six-month process from zero.

A genuine cash buyer removes the two biggest causes of failure in one go: there's no mortgage to be refused, and no chain to break. What you give up is price. Cash buying companies typically pay meaningfully below market value, and that discount is the price of certainty and speed.

Be careful about who you deal with. The cash house buyers market contains reputable National Association of Property Buyers members who fund purchases from their own money and hold their offer — and it contains firms that quote high, tie you in, then reduce the price days before completion when you have nowhere else to go. If you're weighing this route, our guide to selling your house fast sets out what to check and which questions get honest answers.

Whatever you decide, get more than one number. A single offer tells you nothing about whether it's fair.

Will the Government's reforms actually fix this?

The Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap published in June proposes shifting the process to a front-loaded, seller-led model. Instead of a buyer instructing a conveyancer after an offer and only then discovering the problems, sellers and agents would prepare upfront information — including searches and, eventually, a property condition report — at the point of listing.

Huntley's read on it is worth quoting in full: "These sales packs will need to be provided by sellers and estate agents at the point of listing rather than later in the process when the buyer instructs a conveyancer. These property details, provided to buyers and their advisers upfront, should enable faster, more informed decisions and reduce delays, fall throughs and any late surprises. What's interesting is that these proposals will shift housing transactions from a buyer-led model to a front-loaded seller-led one."

The Government's stated ambition is to cut fall-throughs from around one in three to one in seven. If it works, it's transformative.

Two honest caveats. Front-loading moves cost and effort onto sellers before they know whether they'll get an acceptable offer, which will bother anyone simply testing the market. And Scotland has run something close to this for years with the Home Report, which has helped but has not made Scottish transactions instantaneous. Reform will help. It won't arrive in time for anyone listing this autumn.

What to expect between now and the Budget

Three things to watch.

Mortgage rates. Base rate is at 3.75% and lenders have been trimming fixed rates, but the average two-year fix is still well above where it sat in February. Stable rates would help completions as much as they'd help demand, because stability is what stops offers lapsing and being re-underwritten.

September's usual surge — and the reduction wave that comes with it. September is traditionally one of the busiest months for buyers returning to the market. It is also, Zoopla notes, when the share of homes taking price cuts of 5% or more typically peaks. If your home has been sitting since the spring without a reduction, you're about to have company, and being first to adjust is worth more than being last.

The Autumn Budget on 28 October. Expectation alone moves this market. Anything touching property taxation will freeze some buyers in place until they know, and the top of the market is already showing that in its withdrawal-rather-than-discount behaviour.

The bottom line

The headline number here — three in five sales outlasting their own legal searches — is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is that the second half of a house sale in Britain now takes half again as long as it did in 2019, while the first half takes exactly as long as it always did.

You can't control that. You can control how prepared your paperwork is, how carefully you vet your buyer, how hard you chase, and whether your asking price is defensible when a surveyor turns up. Sellers who do those four things aren't immune, but they are markedly less likely to end up in the 60.8%.

And if speed and certainty matter more to you than squeezing out the last few percent — because of probate, a deadline, a difficult property or a sale that's already collapsed once — it's worth knowing what a guaranteed buyer would actually pay before you commit to another six months of hoping. Compare offers from vetted buyers and see the real numbers side by side. No obligation, and at the very least you'll know what your alternative is worth.