Proptech platform begins its first live, end-to-end property transactions after internal and external testing shows sale-to-exchange times falling from an industry average of four to five months to a matter of weeks, the biggest shake-up to the mechanics of moving house since the invention of the “For Sale” board.
There is a peculiar British genius for accepting the completely absurd as simply “how things are done.” We will happily compare seventeen broadband tariffs to save £4 a month, then sign a legal document committing several hundred thousand pounds to buying a house without knowing, at any given moment, whether the sale is actually going to happen. We have engineered same-day delivery for a phone charger and same-hour delivery for a curry, and yet the process of moving into the house that curry gets eaten in still runs, on average, to sixteen weeks of near-total silence, punctuated by the occasional panicked phone call to a solicitor who is, in fairness, also waiting on someone else’s phone call.
CentreMove, the UK proptech platform built to fix exactly this, today confirmed it is beginning its first live, end-toend property transactions, moving from proof-of-concept to real-world proof, and taking direct aim at the single most illogical bottleneck in British life: buying a house.
The problem, in numbers (and it is a genuinely mad set of numbers)
The average UK property transaction takes 16 to 20 weeks from offer to completion. It is getting slower, not faster: the average time from a property going under offer to exchange of contracts in Great Britain reached 104 days this year, up from 76 days in 2019, which means the process has managed to lose nearly a month of its own efficiency in under a decade, an achievement most industries would need to actively try to pull off.
The human cost of that delay is worse than the inconvenience suggests. A full 58% of agreed property sales in the UK collapse before they ever reach completion, not because anyone changed their mind about the house, but because the process itself simply ran out of road. That collapse rate wastes an estimated £2 billion a year: solicitors’ fees, survey costs, removal vans booked and cancelled, and the very British tradition of packing your entire kitchen into boxes twice. Multiply that stress and cost across the roughly 1.2 million transactions that happen in the UK every year, and the numbers become genuinely staggering: a market worth £2.5 billion in conveyancing alone, growing 6–7% annually, moving around £300 billion of property a year, and run, by any modern standard, on the operational logic of a fax machine.
16–20 wks average UK property transaction, offer to completion
58% of agreed sales collapse before completion
£2bn+ estimated annual cost of failed transactions, UK-wide
Why it takes so long in the first place
The uncomfortable truth is that most property transactions don’t fail because of one big catastrophic event. They fail by a thousand small silences. An estate agent chases a solicitor by phone and leaves a voicemail. The solicitor is waiting on a search provider. The search provider is waiting on a local authority. The buyer, meanwhile, is refreshing their inbox and assuming, in the absence of any news, that either everything is fine or everything has quietly fallen apart, with no way of knowing which. Four or five different parties, each holding a different fragment of the same story, coordinating almost entirely through phone calls and email chains that nobody else can see. It isn’t that the people involved are bad at their jobs. It’s that nobody designed a system for them to actually see each other’s jobs.
The mechanics: how CentreMove actually closes the gap
CentreMove replaces that fragmented back-and-forth with a single, shared, live transaction record that every party, whether agent, solicitor, buyer or seller, can see, each with the right level of access for their role. Instead of a sale existing as four separate, half-informed versions of the truth spread across inboxes and voicemail, it exists as one version, updated in real time, visible to everyone who needs it.
Every transaction on the platform is tracked stage by stage: offer accepted, memorandum of sale issued, searches ordered, enquiries raised and answered, mortgage offer received, contracts approved, exchange, so that instead of finding out a stage has stalled three weeks after it happened, everyone involved can see it stalling in real time and act on it immediately. That single change, catching the small delay before it becomes the big one, is where most of the time saving actually comes from: it isn’t that any one step gets dramatically faster, it’s that the gaps between steps, the bits where nothing visibly happens for days at a time, largely disappear.
CentreMove is also built to plug directly into the tools estate agents and conveyancers already use, rather than asking anyone to abandon their existing systems and start again. An integration with SME is already live, with further partnerships in progress, so that information flows into the platform automatically instead of being retyped by hand for the third time that week.
For this first cohort of live transactions, CentreMove is going a step further than the software alone: a member of the CentreMove team is sitting directly alongside each agent, buyer, seller and solicitor throughout, end to end, to prove not just that the platform can do this, but that it does, with a real, dated, verifiable transaction to show for it, rather than a demo.
What the founders say
“Very few problems begin where they eventually appear. Give everyone the same picture, in real time, and it’s remarkably hard to let a transaction quietly fall apart.”
Gordon Sewell, Co-Founder & CEO, CentreMove
“Nobody in a property chain is lying to anybody: they’re just each looking at a different picture. Fix that, and most of the drama simply evaporates.”
Jennifer Sewell, Co-Founder & COO, CentreMove
“We’re not asking anyone to take our word for it any more. We’re handing them real transactions and real numbers instead. That’s not a pitch. That’s proof, with dates on it.”
Wayne Quinn, Co-Founder & CFO, CentreMove
What happens next
CentreMove expects to complete its first cohort of live transactions over the coming weeks, in partnership with estate agents and conveyancing solicitors already onboarded to the platform. The results will be published as fully documented, named case studies and will underpin CentreMove’s wider rollout to agents, lenders and partners across the UK property market.
If it works, and early testing says it does
It will mark the point at which “it normally takes months” stops being an acceptable answer to give a home mover, and starts sounding like something nobody should have to put up with in the first place.
Weeks, not months. And soon, proof to match.
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
- Average UK conveyancing timeline: 16–20 weeks, offer to completion (House of Actors Association / Enact, 2026)
- Average time to exchange: 104 days, up from 76 days in 2019 (Connells Group, May 2026)
- 58% of agreed sales collapse before completion, costing an estimated £2bn/year (OPDA, 2026)
- UK residential conveyancing market: £2.5bn (2025), growing 6–7% annually (Today’s Conveyancer)
MEDIA CONTACT
Alfie Brown · alfie.brown@centremove.com