CentreMove, a UK proptech platform, just proved a property transaction can move in weeks instead of months by giving everyone involved the same real-time view of what’s happening. Look at the US market, where the paperwork is different but the fear, the waiting and the silence are exactly the same, and it is easy to…
In the UK, the problem has a familiar shape. A sale is agreed, and then it disappears into a black box of solicitors, searches and phone calls that can run 16 to 20 weeks before anyone gets a firm date. CentreMove was built to open that black box, giving agents, solicitors, buyers and sellers a single shared view of a transaction as it moves, rather than four different people each guessing at the same story. The company has now begun putting its first live, sale-agreed transactions through the platform end to end, with internal and controlled external testing showing transaction times falling to a matter of weeks.
It is a UK story, told with UK numbers. But sit an American buyer down and describe it to them, and they will not hear a foreign process. They will hear their own.
A process Americans already dread
Ask a recent US homebuyer how the experience felt, and the answer is rarely calm. In one recent national survey, 59% of recent buyers said purchasing a home was more stressful than dating. Another found first-time buyers rating the process as more stressful than planning a wedding. These are not people describing a form they had to fill in. They are describing something that kept them up at night, and for good reason: it is very probably the largest financial decision of their life, playing out largely without them, in offices and inboxes they cannot see into.
That feeling has a source. Once an offer is accepted, a US buyer typically hands their transaction to a network of people they will mostly never meet: a title company running a search they cannot follow, a lender underwriting a loan on a timeline they do not control, an escrow officer holding funds they are told, and simply have to trust, are safe. The buyer’s role, for weeks at a time, is to wait for someone else to call.
The silence has a price, and it is sometimes a criminal one
The most alarming version of this problem is not emotional. It is financial, and it is getting worse. Real estate wire fraud, where a scammer intercepts closing instructions and redirects a buyer’s funds into a fake account, cost American buyers and sellers an estimated $275 million in 2025 alone, according to the FBI, up nearly 60% on the year before. The median loss per victim exceeds $70,000. In most cases, once the wire has gone, the money is simply gone.
The mechanism behind almost every one of these losses is the same: a buyer receiving wiring instructions by email, with no independent way to confirm the message actually came from their title company or attorney. It is a fraud that only works because the process itself is opaque enough for a fake instruction to look exactly like a real one. Fix the visibility problem, and the fraud gets considerably harder to pull off.
$275 million
lost to real estate wire fraud in the US in 2025, up nearly 60% year on year, according to FBI data. Most of it was never recovered.
The scale most people never picture
None of this is a niche problem. American residential real estate is worth an estimated $11.7 trillion, with existing home sales running at an annualized 4.05 million transactions and a median sale price of $431,400. The average US closing still takes 30 to 45 days once a contract is signed, on top of however long it took to find a buyer in the first place. Multiply the stress, the waiting and the fraud exposure across four million transactions a year, and a personal ordeal becomes a national one.
59% of recent US buyers say homebuying was more stressful than dating
30–45 days average US closing timeline, contract to completion
$275M lost to US real estate wire fraud in 2025
Visibility is the fix, wherever the paperwork lives
CentreMove’s platform was not built around any one country’s legal process. It was built around a simpler idea: a transaction should exist as one shared, verified, real-time record that every authorised party, agent, lender, title company, buyer and seller, can see, rather than as four or five separate and unverifiable versions of the truth passed between inboxes. That idea does not become less true when the paperwork is a US title policy instead of a UK conveyance. The instrument changes. The fear of not knowing what is happening to your own money and your own move does not.
“Every buyer we have ever spoken to, in any market, wants the same thing: to know what is actually happening with the biggest purchase of their life, in real time, from a source they can trust. We built CentreMove to give people that. The version of this problem we keep reading about in the US, the stress, the waiting, and now the fraud, is the same problem with a different accent.”
Gordon Sewell, Co-Founder & CEO, CentreMove
“We are not announcing a US launch today. We are pointing out that a $275 million fraud problem, sitting on top of a process four in five buyers already find stressful, tends to get noticed by people who understand both markets. We would rather let our UK transactions prove the model first.”
Wayne Quinn, Co-Founder & CFO, CentreMove
What happens next
CentreMove’s first cohort of live UK transactions is expected to complete over the coming weeks, published as fully documented, dated and verifiable case studies. The team has not set out plans to operate in the United States. It is, however, paying close attention to a market where the emotional and financial cost of an opaque process is now impossible to ignore.
A market worth watching
CentreMove is not currently operating in the United States. The company is, however, tracking the US market with interest as its UK proof points come in, and is open to conversations with investors, partners and operators who know the American property landscape well.
Enquiries of that kind are welcome via the contact details below.
ABOUT CENTREMOVE
CentreMove is a UK proptech platform built to eliminate the delay, uncertainty and collapse rate that plagues property transactions, giving agents, solicitors, buyers and sellers a single shared view of a sale from offer to completion. CentreMove was founded by Gordon Sewell, Jennifer Sewell and Wayne Quinn.
NOTES TO EDITORS
- 59% of recent US homebuyers say the process was more stressful than dating (Redfin survey, cited by National Mortgage Professional, 2026)
- Real estate wire fraud losses in the US: $275.1 million in 2025, up nearly 60% year on year; median loss over $70,000 per victim (FBI / HousingWire, 2026)
- Average US closing timeline: 30–45 days, contract to completion (Zillow / Real Cost Report, 2026)
- US existing home sales: 4.05 million annualized units, July 2026, median price $431,400 (National Association of REALTORS)
- US residential real estate market value: approximately $11.7 trillion (We Lend LLC, 2026)
- Average UK conveyancing timeline: 16–20 weeks, offer to completion (House of Actors Association / Enact, 2026)
MEDIA CONTACT
Alfie Brown · alfie.brown@centremove.com