CentreMove Joins Crowded Race to Fix Britain's Conveyancing Crisis

CentreMove has become the latest technology platform to enter the UK conveyancing market, launching with its first estate agency client as it seeks to carve out space in an increasingly crowded field of firms promising to fix one of property's most persistent pain points. Founded by Wayne Quin alongside solicitors Jen and Gordon Sewell, the platform arrives with a founding team that combines legal practice experience with a clear commercial thesis: that the average UK property transaction, which still takes between 12 and 20 weeks from offer to completion according to widely cited industry estimates, remains stubbornly resistant to digital disruption despite a decade of attempts.

This matters enormously for anyone active in UK property, because conveyancing delay is not a peripheral inconvenience but a structural drag on market liquidity. Estimates from HomeOwners Alliance and various industry bodies have long suggested that around a quarter to a third of transactions fall through before completion, with delays and chain breaks cited as leading causes. For buy-to-let landlords and portfolio investors in markets like Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds, where transaction volumes and speed of execution directly affect yield capture and refinancing timelines, a broken or unreliable conveyancing chain can mean the difference between securing a property at an agreed price and losing it to a rival bidder mid-process. For developers selling off-plan or in bulk to investors, protracted legal completion timelines tie up capital and delay the recycling of funds into subsequent phases.

CentreMove's entry needs to be understood against a backdrop of genuine but uneven progress in proptech conveyancing. Firms such as Coadjute, Thirdfort, and various digital-first conveyancing panels backed by major lenders have spent years attempting to digitise identity verification, anti-money laundering checks, and searches — the administrative bottlenecks that most frequently stall transactions. The Home Buying and Selling Group, working alongside government, has pushed for standardised digital property packs and upfront information disclosure, reforms that the Ministry of Housing has signalled support for but has yet to mandate at scale. Into this landscape, a new entrant backed by practising solicitors carries some credibility advantage — legal practitioners understand precisely where transactions typically stall, whether that is searches taking four to six weeks in some local authority areas, or lenders' solicitors sitting on mortgage offers pending further enquiries.

The commercial challenge, however, is stark. Conveyancing technology has proven a graveyard for well-funded ventures that underestimated the fragmentation of the market: over 5,000 conveyancing firms operate across England and Wales, many small practices resistant to switching case management systems, and estate agents remain the primary referral gatekeeper, meaning platforms must win agency partnerships before winning consumer trust. CentreMove's strategy of onboarding a single estate agency client first is a sensible, low-risk go-to-market approach, but it also signals the scale of the challenge ahead — meaningful market share requires hundreds of such partnerships, not one.

Looking ahead six to twelve months, the practical test for CentreMove and its peers will be whether they can demonstrate measurable reductions in completion times against a market average that has arguably worsened rather than improved since 2020, as search backlogs, mortgage lender caution, and increased fraud-prevention checks have added friction. Any platform that can credibly shave two to four weeks off an average transaction has a genuine value proposition to sell into estate agencies in high-turnover markets such as London's rental-to-sale pipeline, Surrey's family home market, or Liverpool and Newcastle's investor-heavy sales segments, where speed to completion is increasingly used by agents as a competitive differentiator when pitching for instructions.

For landlords and investors, the sensible near-term response is not to bet on any single platform but to favour estate agents and conveyancers who have already integrated digital identity and search tools, regardless of provider, since transaction speed is becoming a genuine differentiator in competitive bidding situations. First-time buyers navigating chains should treat any agent's claims about accelerated conveyancing with appropriate scepticism until completion data is independently verified. The broader signal from CentreMove's launch is that investor and industry appetite for solving transaction friction remains high even as previous attempts have delivered incremental rather than transformative results — and in a market where speed increasingly determines who wins a property, that appetite is unlikely to fade regardless of how many platforms succeed or fail.