Nearly half of Britain now says buying a home is more stressful than the thing that legally ends a marriage. The reason has almost nothing to do with boxes.
There is a peculiar bit of British psychology on display every time a moving-house survey does the rounds: nearly half of us — 48 per cent, according to the most recent count — will tell a researcher, apparently without irony, that moving house was more stressful than the thing that legally ends a marriage. Divorce comes in a distant second, chosen by a mere third of respondents. We have, as a nation, decided that swapping one set of keys for another is a bigger ordeal than swapping one set of vows for a solicitor’s letter.
This ought to strike us as strange. Divorce involves the genuine unravelling of a life — custody, grief, the division of decades. Moving house, in principle, involves a change of address and a van. That the two now sit roughly level on the nation’s stress index tells you something important, and it isn’t that we’ve become soft. It is that the process itself has been quietly engineered — by nobody in particular, and by everybody a little bit — to manufacture more anxiety than the situation actually warrants.
It is rather like being the only person in a play who hasn’t been given the script, expected to follow the plot entirely from other people’s facial expressions.
Start with money, since it is the most honest measure of a system nobody designed on purpose. The average home mover now spends an unplanned £1,836 they did not budget for — closer to £2,000 in London and Belfast — not because moving is inherently expensive in ways nobody could foresee, but because nobody tells you the full bill up front. Search fees appear later. Survey costs surface after you thought you were done. A solicitor’s letter arrives itemising disbursements you didn’t know existed, at a moment — three weeks before you’re meant to be packing boxes — almost perfectly designed to maximise alarm.
Ask a psychologist why moving ranks where it does and they will tell you something that has very little to do with boxes and a great deal to do with control. Human beings tolerate almost any amount of bad news, provided they can see it coming. What we cannot tolerate is silence — the three-week gap between “your offer has been accepted” and “we’re still waiting to hear from the other side’s solicitor”, during which a buyer’s imagination, entirely unsupervised, fills in the blanks with worst-case scenarios. It is not the delay that produces the stress. It is not knowing whether the delay means anything.
And there is a great deal of not-knowing to be getting on with. A single house move quietly recruits five separate professionals — an agent, a solicitor on each side, a broker, sometimes a surveyor — each of whom can see their own portion of the process and precisely none of anyone else’s. You, the person actually moving, are the only party present in every single conversation, and also the only party denied a full view of any of them. It is rather like being the only person in a play who hasn’t been given the script, expected to follow the plot entirely from other people’s facial expressions.
None of this is a law of nature. It survives because nobody has ever been made responsible for the experience of the person actually moving — only for their own small segment of it. Give a buyer and seller the same realtime view of the chain that their agent and solicitors already have — so that a delay reads as “searches are running two days behind, entirely normal” rather than a worrying silence open to interpretation — and a huge portion of that stress evaporates before a single box gets packed. Not because the process necessarily becomes faster, though in our experience it generally has, but because uncertainty, not distance, was doing almost all of the damage.
We didn’t rank moving house above divorce because British life has got easier and divorce has got harder. We ranked it there because we built an industry that keeps people in the dark about the most significant purchase most of them will ever make, and then act surprised when the not-knowing hurts more than the move itself. Fix the visibility, and you will not just fix the stress. You will, in a quiet and rather satisfying way, put divorce back in its rightful place at the top of that particular league table.
About CentreMove. CentreMove is the UK’s first single, real-time view of a property transaction — connecting buyers, sellers, estate agents, mortgage brokers and solicitors on one shared chain tracker, from instruction to exchange. Founded by Gordon Sewell, Jennifer Sewell and Wayne Quinn. centremove.com