We sold our house last year. Found a buyer quickly. Agreed a price. Job done, right?

It took 8 months to complete.

Not because of anything complicated. No chain collapse, no survey disasters, no renegotiation on price. Just poor communication, missing paperwork, and two sets of solicitors who couldn’t seem to talk to each other.

The forms nobody told us about

We instructed our solicitors and assumed things would start moving. They didn’t.

Weeks went by before we discovered there were forms we should have completed the moment we decided to sell. Property information forms, fixtures and fittings lists, leasehold documentation. Basic stuff that every seller needs to provide.

Nobody told us. Our solicitors didn’t flag them upfront, didn’t send us a checklist, didn’t explain that these forms are the starting gun for the entire transaction. By the time we found out, we’d already lost weeks. And the forms themselves? They just needed filling in. If someone had told us on day one, we’d have done them that evening.

By the time our solicitors finally told us what was needed, we were travelling in Brazil. So there we were, sitting in a hostel completing property information forms on a phone, emailing scanned documents back to the UK, chasing confirmations across time zones.

These forms should have been done before we even listed the property. Instead, the process stalled for weeks because nobody thought to prepare us.

The black hole

Once the paperwork was in, we expected things to speed up. They didn’t.

What followed was months of silence. Our solicitors would say they were waiting on the buyer’s solicitors. The buyer’s solicitors would say they were waiting on ours. Nobody knew what was actually outstanding or who was supposed to do what next.

There was no shared view of the transaction. Just two firms emailing documents back and forth, with neither side having any real visibility into where things stood. As a seller trying to plan your life around a completion date that keeps slipping, it was infuriating.

So who actually kept things moving?

The estate agent became the project manager

It wasn’t either set of solicitors. It was our estate agent.

Without him, I genuinely believe the sale would have fallen through. He was relentless. Chasing both sets of solicitors, relaying messages between parties, pushing for updates when everyone else had gone quiet. When our solicitors went silent for weeks, he got them moving. When the buyer’s side stalled, he was on the phone. He held the whole deal together through sheer persistence.

He became the de facto project manager for the entire transaction. That is not his job.

But here’s what’s broken: he had every incentive to keep things moving (estate agents don’t get paid until completion) yet he had the least visibility into the process. He’s not a lawyer. He didn’t have access to the legal documents. He was working blind, making phone calls, and hoping someone picked up.

The most motivated person in the transaction had the least tools to do anything about it.

What should have happened

None of this was inevitable. On day one, we should have received a clear checklist of every document needed. Both sides should have been working from the same status view instead of emailing PDFs back and forth. Updates should have been automatic. And our estate agent should have had full visibility without having to chase anyone.

These are process failures that technology solved in every other industry years ago.

Why I’m building DealSync

The average time from offer to exchange in England and Wales is now 135 days, up from 93 days in 2019. Ours took over 240. The process is getting slower, not faster. The work isn’t the bottleneck. The communication is.

This experience is why I started building DealSync. It’s a deal workflow platform where both sides of a property transaction work in one place. Solicitors, estate agents, buyers and sellers, all with visibility into the same transaction, seeing the same status, working from the same documents.

No more chasing. No more “we’re waiting on the other side.” No more estate agents working blind.

It doesn’t have to be this way. And it won’t be for much longer.

Next in this series

In part two, I’ll look at this from the conveyancing firm’s perspective: why slow, opaque processes are costing firms clients and revenue.

In part three, I’ll talk to estate agents about the role they’ve been forced into as unpaid project managers, and how giving them proper visibility changes everything.

Mark Marley is the founder of DealSync, a deal workflow platform for UK law firms. Had a similar experience? Connect with him on LinkedIn.