The Government just caught up. We've been here for a decade. Here's what the updates mean for you.
On 19th June 2026, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government published its Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap. It is, without question, the most significant statement of intent for the property transaction process in a generation.
And I say that not with surprise, but with something close to vindication.
Because everything in that document, the mandatory upfront property information, the digital sales packs, the standardised data, the connected professionals, the end to the madness of discovering a deal-breaking problem only after three months of stress and solicitor fees, is what Sprift has been building toward for the last ten years. It is what I have personally been arguing for, in meetings, at conferences, in conversations with agents, conveyancers, lenders, and policymakers, for at least as long.
The numbers behind the broken process
The roadmap opens with a brutal diagnosis. Transactions take around 120 days on average to complete. That timeline is now roughly 60% longer than it was in 2007. One in three transactions fall through entirely, costing consumers approximately £400 million a year and the wider economy around £1.5 billion annually.
These are not natural phenomena. They are the entirely predictable consequences of a system that withholds critical information until late in the process, relies on paper, allows commitment to remain effectively optional until exchange, and asks the same questions over and over again because no one has built the infrastructure to share the answers.
We have accepted this dysfunction for so long that many people came to treat it as inevitable. It was never inevitable. It was a choice, made by inertia.
What the roadmap actually says
The Government has committed to a phased but genuinely ambitious programme. Mandatory upfront sales packs, backed by legislation, will contain title information, standard searches, a property condition report, leasehold and estate terms, building safety data and more. Digital property logbooks will be mandated across all transactions. Binding conditional contracts will follow once packs are embedded. And a programme of dataset digitalisation will run in parallel, with £1.4 million committed immediately to work with local authorities on building control and highways data.
The full detail, including the specific data points in Annex B, is worth reading in full. Read the Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap.
This is a whole-system approach. And that matters, because piecemeal reform has failed repeatedly before.
What this means for you as a consumer
Right now, when you put your home on the market, you are not required to tell a buyer very much at all. The information that might make or break their decision, the tenure details, the ground rent, the building safety status, the flood risk, the restrictive covenants, does not have to be disclosed at the point of listing. It surfaces weeks or months later, sometimes never, sometimes at the worst possible moment.
Under the Government's roadmap, that changes. A prospective buyer will be able to access a full picture of a property before they make an offer. They will make an informed decision rather than an optimistic one. And when they say yes, both sides will be committing to something that actually binds them, with defined exceptions and penalty provisions for anyone who walks away without legitimate cause.
For sellers, this is equally significant. You will no longer be at the mercy of a buyer who invests nothing, discovers nothing surprising, and still pulls out six weeks before completion because they changed their mind. And for leaseholders in particular, the roadmap addresses the long-standing issue of freeholders and managing agents dragging their feet or charging extortionate fees to provide information you are legally entitled to sell your own home.
This is not a minor administrative update. This is a reset of the fundamental power dynamic in property transactions.
Ten years of building the infrastructure for this moment
Sprift was founded on a single conviction: that the home buying and selling process is broken because the data exists to fix it, but nobody has assembled it into something useful.
For a decade, we have been doing exactly that. We have aggregated, structured, and delivered property data that would otherwise require a buyer, seller, or professional to consult dozens of separate sources, many of them manual, many of them slow, some of them entirely inaccessible without specialist knowledge. We have built tools that put material information into the hands of agents, conveyancers, and consumers at the point it is needed, not the point it is legally required.
I have personally spent that same decade making the case for upfront information. Not because it is good for Sprift, though it is. Because it is the right thing for the people who go through this process. The homebuyers who take time off work to chase solicitors. The sellers who restructure their lives around a completion date that then evaporates. The first-time buyers who lose thousands in survey and legal fees on a transaction that was always going to fall apart, if only someone had looked properly at the title register.
The Government's roadmap validates every argument we have made. It also creates the conditions in which those arguments can finally be put into practice at scale.
Why this time is different
It is fair to be cautious. Home Information Packs (HIPs) were introduced in 2007 and abandoned in 2010. The HIPs failure looms over every reform conversation, and the roadmap addresses it directly: those packs were paper-based, lacked industry collaboration, used jargon instead of insight, and were launched without the digital infrastructure to make them work.
This time, the infrastructure exists. HMLR's APIs are live. The Open Property Data Association's trust framework has been tested. Digital logbook providers are operational. Verified digital identity services are certified. The DPMSG has been building cross-industry alignment since 2023. The difference between 2007 and 2026 is not just technology. It is that the technology has been proven.
The Government has also committed to sequencing these changes carefully. Sales packs first. Binding contracts only once packs are embedded. Legislation where needed, guidance to build readiness in advance. This is not a big bang. It is a considered programme.
The role Sprift will play
The roadmap names proptech as a critical enabler. It commits to creating the regulatory conditions, standardised data, open APIs, smart data schemes, accredited digital identity, that allow companies like Sprift to build the products the system needs.
We are already there. We have been building toward this for ten years. The question now is how quickly we can put our infrastructure, our data, our integrations, and our experience to work in the new landscape the government is creating.
The reforms ahead are an enormous opportunity. Not just for Sprift, but for every professional who has ever watched a good transaction collapse for want of information that should have been available from day one.
The Government has drawn the map. The industry now has to follow it.
We know the way. We have been walking it for a decade.
See what upfront looks like on a real property.
Book a 20-minute demo and we'll show you a property you're working on. You'll see exactly what information is available and from day one and how Sprift can support you under the new requirements.
