Residential conveyancing in England and Wales had 10,724 solicitors practising in January 2026, more than 2,000 fewer than at the end of 2021, according to the IRN conveyancing market report from Access Legal. The same report links the strain to workload and a run of compliance changes: tighter anti-money laundering checks and the new mandatory TA6 and TA7 property forms.
If you work in an agency, that explains a lot of the weeks you can't account for between sale agreed and exchange. Fewer people are processing more paperwork, and a good share of it is the same facts gathered by hand on every file: title, tenure, energy rating, flood risk, planning history.
When a compliance load rises, the answer is rarely more hours. It is getting the right record in at the point of entry so nobody has to chase it later. Conveyancing is the same problem at a larger scale.
The useful question for an agent is what a conveyancer will ask for in week three, and whether you can have it in the file before the sale is agreed. For a conveyancing firm, it's whether those facts can be fetched in seconds rather than typed in. That's the part software can take on without replacing anyone's judgement, and it's why we built Propalt AI to fetch those facts straight from the data.
Co-founder of Propalt and a property investor and developer for 20 years
