Why agents carry the blame for a transaction system that was never built to keep anyone in the loop — and what changes when it finally does.
Ask the British public what they think of estate agents and you will get a pantomime villain: a figure in a slightly-too-shiny suit who says “bijou” when they mean small, and “characterful” when they mean you will hit your head on the door frame. Ask the same people about their own estate agent — the one who actually sold their house — and something odd happens. They soften. They mention the evenings she spent chasing a search that should have taken ten days and took ten weeks. They call him, unprompted, “the only one who actually told us anything.” The villain of the industry, it turns out, is very rarely the person standing in front of you. He is off-page. He is the plumbing.
This is worth sitting with, because it explains a great deal about why agents take the reputational hit for a system they did not design and cannot fix. A waiter who tells you your main course is delayed gets tutted at, even though he is not, generally speaking, in the kitchen. He is merely the last visible human standing between you and your disappointment. Estate agents have spent the best part of two decades playing this role for an entire industry: the last visible human between a buyer and a conveyancing process that is, by any sane measure, a shambles.
The agent’s job, in this arrangement, is to stand in the corridor between five closed rooms and relay whatever fragments of news happen to drift out.
The numbers bear this out, in the dry way numbers do. Roughly one in four agreed sales in Britain now collapses before it ever reaches completion — not eventually, not after some minor renegotiation, but entirely, from a standing start, sending everyone back to square one. The average time from offer to exchange has just been recorded at 123 days, and it is rising, not falling. In an age when you can have a sofa delivered from Sweden in under a week and know, to the minute, when the driver will ring your doorbell, the sale of a £300,000 asset — arguably the most consequential purchase most people ever make — takes four times as long as human gestation and offers roughly the same amount of visibility into progress.
None of this is the agent’s fault, and almost none of it is within an agent’s power to fix, which is precisely the problem. A transaction has five principal parties: buyer, seller, agent, and two solicitors, with brokers, surveyors and lenders drifting in and out like weather systems. Each can see their own small corner of the process with perfect clarity, and everyone else’s corner not at all. It is a jigsaw puzzle being assembled by five people in five different rooms, each convinced they are holding the edge pieces, none of them allowed to see the box lid. The agent’s job, in this arrangement, is to stand in the corridor between the rooms and relay whatever fragments of news happen to drift out — which is a bit like asking the person who delivers the post to also explain the plot of every letter inside it.
The commercial cost of this is not abstract. Every week a chain sits in silence is a week in which a buyer starts browsing other properties, a seller starts ringing your competitor to ask “is this normal?”, and the instruction you worked genuinely hard to win quietly curdles into a complaint. You are not losing trust because you did anything wrong. You are losing trust because you are the only party in the transaction who actually answers the phone, and everybody else’s silence gets billed to your account.
Here is the reframe worth making to anyone who still thinks this is simply how property works: it does not have to be. Not one of the professionals involved is incompetent, and not one of them is dragging their feet out of malice. The problem is that nobody in the transaction has ever been given a shared, live view of where things actually stand — so every delay looks, from the outside, exactly like negligence, because negligence and a search sitting untouched in a council inbox produce identical silence. Give everyone — buyer, seller, agent, both solicitors — the same real-time view of the chain, with blockers visible the moment they appear rather than three weeks later in an increasingly clipped email, and the entire psychology of the transaction changes. Delay stops looking like betrayal. It starts looking like what it usually is: a Tuesday.
That is the idea behind CentreMove: one shared transaction, visible in real time to everyone who has a legitimate reason to be in it, with sellers able to start preparing legal paperwork and running searches from the day they instruct you rather than the day an offer finally lands. We built it because we were tired of watching good agents take the blame for other people’s inboxes. The first live transactions are already moving through the platform faster than the industry norm — weeks, not months — not because anyone is working harder, but because nobody is waiting in the dark any more.
Estate agents did not build the plumbing that keeps failing behind their walls, and they should stop apologising for it as though they did. The fix was never “try harder on the phone.” It was making the pipes visible. Once a client can see the pipes for themselves, the pantomime villain, rather satisfyingly, retires.
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