Rob Gurney, MD, Ochresoft
We all knew the UK’s residential property market was seeing unprecedented levels of activity in the first half of the year; the instruction traffic progressing through our Intelliworks case management system gave us a very clear indicator of course, as well as the conversations we were having with our conveyancing clients and colleagues, which provided us with daily anecdotes.
The launch of the latest edition of Landmark Information’s Property Trends Report gives us a true statistical view on what was handled during April, May and June; the proof is truly in the numbers.
It reported that residential completions jumped by 85% in June (compared to June 2019), and search orders by legal professionals were up 43% in April, compared to April 2019.
The data that I find particularly interesting is the Completions to Instructions Ratio. This gives a real indicator regarding the pressures facing property lawyers and conveyancers. Typically a higher percentage suggests a more manageable relationship between incoming and outgoing workloads. The average CIR for what would be considered a ‘normal’ year (2019) was 69%. By the end of March this year, this had increased to 82%, which jumped again to 115% by the end of June.
For me, this really emphasizes the impressive achievement of those who were responsible for converting the high transaction levels into completions, particularly when workloads were under pressure from new instructions continuing to land on their desks.
I greatly admire the resilience of our customers and colleagues in achieving the level of completions that they have and now look forward to seeing what the next quarter brings as the 0% Stamp Duty threshold remains in place for properties up to the value of £250,000 until 30th September.
In the meantime, I encourage you to take a look at the Property Trends Report to see an accurate cross-market analysis of the residential market.
As first published by Inside Conveyancing.
