Transportation shortage continues despite property sales…

Real estate market activity has slowed, but transfer companies continue to grapple with delays that have pushed their average caseloads to the second-highest level per quarter since 2011.

Acumen’s latest conveyancing market tracker found that the average property law firm handled 84 cases during the first quarter of 2023.

This is a 9% increase from the prior quarter and the second-highest average caseload per quarter since the software company began keeping records in 2011.

While the first-quarter numbers actually represent a 12% year-over-year decline, reflecting a slower real estate market, Search Acumen’s analysis shows that the average company is handling more than twice as many cases each quarter than it was a decade ago, when the average number of quarterly cases per company was only 40.

Over the past decade, the number of active real estate law firms has fallen 8% from 4,402 to 4,045, Search Acumen said.

Over the same time period, the average number of cases per quarter shot up 93%, from 176,110 to 339,346.

While the number of active companies has now recovered to pre-pandemic levels, increasing by 2% from 3,961 in the first quarter of 2019 to 4,045 in the first three months of 2023, this increase is a long way from allowing companies will keep pace with the scale of long-term growth in the number of cases, Search Acumen said.

Andy Sommerville, Director of Search Acumen, said: “Although market activity has slowed in the current economic climate, the processing delays create a mixed effect, meaning that the number of cases for property lawyers remains high by historical standards. This creates a paradox in that law firms remain incredibly busy almost regardless of general market conditions.

“Law firms, along with the Land Registry and the technology sector, have made great strides in adopting and implementing new technologies to address historical backlogs and speed up the process for future transactions. This is having an impact, but more is needed given the sheer scale of the task at hand.

“We are among the first in the industry to integrate large language models into our proprietary customer data and information platform because generative AI offers tremendous potential to make transactions more efficient from start to finish. We know that companies are starting to get involved with this exciting technology, but it is the adoption of these innovations at scale that is needed to really move the needle.”