Why is buying a house in Britain more stressful than childbirth?

Buying a house in this country has something of Leo Tolstoy’s famous opening line in Anna Karenina about it: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Ask people about their experience of homebuying and, though the responses you’ll get will be uniformly negative, each one will be specific to that individual – uniquely awful in its own way.

For my part, within six months I had offers on three consecutive properties get accepted and fall through. Although the fourth one stuck, by the time I held those hallowed front door keys in my hand, it was nigh on eight months after I’d first agreed to buy the damn thing. It should have been an “easy” sale – I was a first-time buyer purchasing from a literal dead woman, the definition of chain-free – but this somehow did nothing to speed up the endless path to home ownership.

I initially thought my own heinous experience was out of the ordinary – a tale so blighted by obstacles and frustrations that it was in some way “special”. I soon discovered that it was par for the course. No one, but no one, seems to get through buying or selling a house in Britain without wanting to hurl themselves into the sea. With rocks tied to their ankles.

In fact, moving house has been ranked as one of the most stressful life experiences, surpassing job interviews, dental work and even childbirth (!), according to a survey of 2,000 UK homeowners. So, why is it so inordinately terrible?

Cost, naturally, is the biggest initial stumbling block. Property prices are so divorced from reality at this point that we’ve had to develop a whole new way of buying homes – “shared ownership” – where you’re only buying a percentage of a property and renting the rest of it (a case of “worst of both worlds” if ever there was one). The average asking price hit a record high of nearly £380,000 in May, while the average price of a home in Britain is now £268,319, more than seven times the average salary (£37,430).

As most mortgage providers will only lend up to 4.5 times a person’s yearly income, that leaves a substantial deposit to be cobbled together; this amount has reached an average of £68,154 for a first-time buyer in England, much of that from the bank of Mum and Dad.

The other expenses also stack up to an eye-watering sum: there’s stamp duty to pay (from 2 to 12 per cent of the property price, unless you’re a first-time buyer purchasing a home under £300,000); a potential mortgage-booking fee (up to £300); mortgage arrangement fee (up to £2,500); solicitors’/conveyancing fees (up to £1,500); homebuyer’s survey (£300 to £1,500); and, if you manage to finally sign on the dotted line, there are moving costs to be factored in (averaging £1,044). Minus the deposit, the average cost of buying and selling a house in 2025 is £15,108.

The sheer amount of money involved makes the process fraught and therefore slow, according to property expert and professional property buyer Jonathan Rolande. “Most fundamentally, this is a really expensive commitment, so people are generally very wary,” he says.

Then there’s the fact that you have to deal with estate agents. They’re not all terrible, of course, but many of us have encountered those who make the process actively worse – whether it’s because they’re pressuring you into a bidding war, lying about the fundamentals of a property, or shrugging in disinterested ignorance when you ask basic questions such as how much the service charge is.

Only 37 per cent of people trust an estate agent to tell them the truth, according to the 2024 Ipsos Mori Veracity Index. Yet however bad the experience is, the agent walks away with thousands of pounds in commission for each sale – usually around 2 per cent of the total property value.

Lewis Buckley and Allan Wood found this so excruciating that they set up Hiizzy, an online platform through which homeowners can cut out the middleman and sell their house themselves – minus the estate agent. “We believe that there’s a high proportion of people that are capable of doing this themselves,” says Wood. “What estate agents want you to believe is that it’s very complex and opaque, and that is not true.”

One issue is the chronic overvaluing of houses by agents. “Properties don’t sell if they’re overvalued, and then people get disgruntled because they have to drop their price,” says Buckley. This is a regular occurrence, adds Wood, because estate agents are incentivised to overpromise. “If an estate agent visits your property and asks you what you want to put it on for, they don’t tell you ‘That’s absolutely ludicrous, you’re never going to get that’ – because then they don’t get the instruction,” he explains. “They’re driven by commissions, and they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear. It’s about getting you to sign on the dotted line.”

It’s for the same reason that some agents might take their time when it comes to chasing up paperwork – they’re likely more concerned with their next potential sale. “The people who most want to chase it are really the homebuyer and the home seller – because the agents are more focused on winning their next instruction once you’ve said you’re going to buy it,” says RBC Capital housing market analyst Anthony Codling.

This, inevitably, is the biggest stumbling block when buying or selling a property – the glacial pace at which everything seems to move throughout the entire process. Getting a house on the market can feel sluggish enough, but the real endurance test comes when an offer has been accepted and the solicitors get involved. Rolande tells me about a sale he has just overseen: “Very keen first-time buyer, empty house, no problems, paperwork delivered to buyer’s solicitor in one day after sale was agreed – it still took three months!”

If the housebuying process in this country feels clunky and antiquated, that’s because it is. The first estate agent was established in 1805, and the industry really got going in the late 1800s as surveyors turned to helping people sell houses as a result of the industrial revolution. Since then, the process has remained bafflingly similar, despite the tech we now have at our fingertips. “The only thing that’s really changed is that some agents have gone online, but they are fundamentally providing the same service,” says Buckley. “Other industries have all been disrupted,” adds Wood. “It’s the final frontier.”

The lack of speed can in part be attributed to the fact that so much of the industry remains stubbornly paper-based, and analogue rather than digital. Every time a house is bought or sold, the same mandatory local authority and environmental searches have to be done again from scratch – despite the fact that the findings probably won’t have changed since the last time.

“The main culprits are solicitors – they haven’t gone as far with technology as they could or should have done,” claims Rolande. “They’re also hamstrung by local authorities, who are slow off the mark with searches. There are little delays everywhere – so it grows and creates a domino effect.” He argues that searches should be instant and completely digital, all stored on a central database, while solicitors “are still in the habit of sending out letters – they need to embrace not just email, but online platforms that are industry standard, so that everyone can look at the process and be reminded about when things are needed.”

Meanwhile, Codling argues that most high-street solicitors inevitably let conveyancing tasks slip down the to-do list. “They don’t do many conveyancing jobs a year, right?” he says. “So it’s never top of their priority list. They don’t do that many, and it’s not the most efficient process. It’s all paper-based, it’s not digital, and they’re waiting for other people to get back to them.”

There are signs that at least some technological advancement is on the cards. Codling tells me that the Land Registry, which records land ownership and issues title registers – the documents that confirm ownership of properties in England and Wales – is planning to digitise after a successful pilot. But it’s “a multi, multi-year project” rather than something that’s just around the corner. The Law Society, meanwhile, explored something similar before realising it was going to cost too much.

The time it takes currently to buy and sell property is a problem, because it increases the chance that issues will arise and a sale will fall through – particularly in a chain, where multiple purchases are happening at once. If one falls through, the entire chain can collapse, potentially costing thousands in wasted legal fees and surveys. “A one-month sale – which is what it should be – instead of a three-month sale, means there’s a third of the time for someone to change their mind, for a relationship to break down, for someone to be made redundant or fall ill,” says Rolande. “Every month of waiting you add on means an increased risk of problems.”

This risk is at least in part fuelled by the total lack of legal protection in England and Wales prior to the exchange of contracts. Before that, you can spend months paying for paperwork and chasing documents, only for the seller to turn round and ask for more money, or decide to sell to a higher bidder instead (known as gazumping). Vice versa, the day before exchange, a buyer can suddenly try to gauge the seller’s price and offer less money, or threaten to walk away from the deal (gazundering).

The Wild West-esque lack of protection makes the whole thing feel incredibly precarious – unlike the Scottish system, where the buyer and seller have entered into a legally binding contract the second the latter accepts the former’s offer. This makes it more difficult for either party to back out, and tangibly results in a speedier process from start to finish.

The experts I speak to can all envisage a future in which buying and selling property is faster, sleeker and more efficient. “If you can get everything digital, if you can get the emphasis on the seller,” says Codling, that would improve the experience. “They want to sell. So it’s in their interest to put everything in one place.” If sellers were required to have all their documentation in order before they were even allowed to put their home on the market, “that really would solve the problem overnight, because if you wanted to sell your home and you hadn’t got all this stuff together, you’re not going to be able to even advertise your home for sale”.

Buckley and Wood foresee a world in which blockchain technology is used across the industry to consolidate every piece of information about a property. “Legal titles, local authority searches, you name it – anything that pertains to the property could sit on the blockchain, and you build up this wonderful provenance about it,” says Buckley wistfully. “It should no longer be that extraordinarily delayed, boring, analogue process that people have to go through. The whole thing needs attention from top to bottom.”

Though there’s potentially light at the end of the tunnel, revolutionary change still feels like it might be some way off. In the meantime, British buyers and sellers can take comfort in the fact that patience is, apparently, a virtue.