It takes longer to sell a home in the UK than in 12 other countries examined by new analysis.
Moverly, which provides digital property information packs, looked at the average time it takes to sell a home in countries that are popular with UK expats.
Across the 12 nations, it takes an average 110 days for a property to go from its initial listing all the way through to completion.
The fastest homeselling nation is the US where it takes an average of just 53 days to go from listing to ‘closing’.
At the bottom of the table with the slowest selling process is the UK, where it takes an average of 179 days or almost six months to go from listing to completion.
This is 70% longer than the US, equivalent to a difference of 126 days.
Other nations to have fast selling processes include the United Arab Emirates (70 days), New Zealand (72 days), Canada (90 days), and Australia (95 days).
The countries where homeselling takes almost as long as the UK include Italy (159 days), Spain (152 days), Portugal (152 days) and Singapore (152 days), while Germany (137 days), and France (105 days) sit middle of the table.
Moverly chief executive Gemma Young says: “It seems you have to move halfway around the world to access a decent home selling process. The Americans are showing the rest of the world up while the UK is making everyone else look very good.
“That’s not to say the US model is better, but it’s certainly much faster and we should be doing everything we can to speed up what has become a painfully sluggish journey here in the UK.
“Conveyancing is a definite culprit when it comes to delaying the selling process and this is because too many of the legal processes that pave the way to exchange of contracts have remained unchanged for decades, if not longer.
“By simply streamlining and digitising many of the conveyancing processes, we have proven that the time to sell can be reduced from up to 70%, which means the UK is perfectly capable of matching the speed of the US market.
“As more and more agents and conveyancers adopt the tech solutions that are now widely available to them, we expect the UK’s performance to see radical improvement in a short period of time.”
