Could the property market benefit from a Burnham bounce?

Having completed half of 2026 it's a good time to sit down with regular contributors Ben Robinson and Rob Gurney of Landmark and Ochresoft respectively to look at what has happened in the property market over the first half of 2026, and what it's in store for the second half. 

Looking at Landmark's own data, there is a really mixed picture. Listings remain reasonably strong, but demand is falling, evidenced by falling number of sold properties. Conveyancers remain steady but be careful reading too much into comparisons with 2025 warns Gurney. The run up to , and immediate aftermath of the end of SDLT incentives significantly distorts the first half of 2025.

Many of the demand side challenges discussed in previous podcasts remain; it will be interesting to see how the Summer, a traditionally quieter time for the property market, pans out, and whether the country benefits from a "Burnham bounce" given the imminent arrival of a new Labour leader, and prime minister.

Listen in for the latest market insight and opinions. 

The Today's Conveyancer podcast can be found on your preferred podcast provider and also at www.todaysconveyancer.co.uk. Subscribe and listen in for all the latest conveyancing industry news and views. 

Thank you to our podcast sponsors LEAP Legal Software and InfoTrack

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:23

You're listening to the Today's Conveyancer Podcast, the leading source of information for residential property lawyers in England and Wales. Don't forget to subscribe and sign up to our free newsletter at today'sconveyancer.co.uk. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

SPEAKER_02 0:45

Hello, welcome along to the latest Today's Conveyancer podcast. It's our final one before we break for the summer, and I'm delighted to welcome Rob Gurney and Ben Robinson on, who uh are here to talk about the latest landmark property trends report. Uh, for those of you who haven't listened to this podcast before, uh you guys, you've you've got some insight into the market uh that you can share that comes from landmark zone data. Uh and uh specifically we're looking at things like listings, sold subject to contract, search order volume, completion volumes, and getting a real feel for where the market is. We're midpoint in 2026, so it's a good time to take stock and reflect. Great to have you both on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining. Ben, in the first instance, I think probably best to start with where are we in terms of how the estate agency market is feeling and that uh pipeline as we lead up to conveyances.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Yeah, thanks, David. Um, I think uh general sentiment is is one of uh uncertainty and concern. And I think if you look at the listing numbers, which have remained relatively high over the last couple of years, despite uncertainty driven by a number of factors, including uh rental reforms, uh driving sort of landlords to sell up and increasing that sort of uh available stock. Um, actually, we saw uh over the quarter be about 1% down uh in terms of listings to the market, but that was uh a decreasing picture with June being 3% down. Um and I think you know that's obviously been magnified by what's going on in the world because this goes through from April um to June and people putting off decisions. Sellers, of course, are in intent to move, um, and they uh tend not to do that so much when the world's not in a great place, and that's the start of the pipe. So we're seeing a little bit of drop-off there, and I think that's also reflective of fewer sales, um, you know, uh eventually starting to impact sellers well. They see the lot of stock on a lot of for sale boards, not many sold boards, they'll often put off or wait till summer, wait till a bit more certainty, wait for this. I think finally to that is uh a lot of because the rental reform um uh changes it through now, a lot of uh the people who were going to put on the market have put on the market, so we've probably seen a dearth of that. Um, I think then there's a lot of sitting stock, a lot of sitting stock, hence putting new sales off potentially. Um, and that means price pressure because uh sales, um, although I'm not about stealing too much of Robson just from the agency's view, sales improved through the quarter, sales agreed. Um, I think that's because a lot of prices have adjusted to a more realistic position and interest rates are holding relatively flat, it's still particularly low considering the amount of stock uh that's on there. So, you know, agents make money when they sell and complete. What we're finding from agents is that uh those sales um you know lower sales, lots of stock to manage, um, lots of empty rental stock, which actually could be quite hard to move because sometimes it's not a great condition, and landlords don't always have the same financial incentive to drop the price when you try and move it through. And actually, uh, where interest rates and inflation come in, that sort of mid to higher rather than very higher end of the market struggling a little bit as well in terms of flowing through. Um, and that's leaving agents uh worried because future cash flows, um battening down the hatches, looking to digitize, and I think um you know, also really trying to preciously protect their pipelines, um, but in protracted timescales, as we have, and we all know, um, following government reform announcement, hopefully that will force things to change. But at the moment we are where we are. That means, especially where there's choice, a lot of buyer negotiation. So that takes time, it's a burden again, and means much more likely that it'll fall through and you're trying to pull things together. So there's just lots going on at the moment that isn't particularly positive, albeit coming towards the end of the quarter, at least it did look like people were starting to commit to purchases again.

SPEAKER_02 4:53

We've got listings that are broadly in line with uh the same numbers as last year. So it doesn't feel as though we have a supply problem particularly. It feels, like you say, Ben, there's much more of a dim, there are more demand pressures than there are supply pressures.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Absolutely. Absolutely, because we've still got loads of stock and it's still pretty good normal numbers, even though it dropped in June. Um, you know, for unlike post-COVID, where agents were scrapping to get anything because they were selling things off market right now. Uh they're just trying to get the right things that will sell and be realistic with sellers and find buyers and hold sales together. Complete dynamic shift, and it's a lot of time spent grinding for much less income, which is not great for anybody.

SPEAKER_02 5:34

The the flow through then for conveyancing, Rob, is a bit of a mixed picture then.

SPEAKER_03 5:40

Yeah, it is. I mean, we'll start with the the less positive news, which is you know, over the the quarter compared to the the quarter of last year, um lawyer instructions were down seven percent uh across across that quarter. Um but to put a bit of a positive spin on it, that situation varies from which month you look at. And if you look at the the trend, the trend is actually a positive one. So just to sort of break that down, April we were 10% um below where we were in April 25. Uh it was 7% in May, and then only 4% down in June versus June 25. Um, and actual fact, the the June numbers um in real terms as well as compared to last year. Um, June is the highest month that we've seen for new law instructions in this uh calendar year so far. So um so yes, we're down, but it's uh it's looking like well, certainly from from April all the way up to to the end of June, it looked like a sort of a slightly improving position, and that's obviously something that we'll we'll cling on to. I think why we started 10% down in April versus April 25 has kind of as much to do with the situation back in 25 as it does, you know, current market dynamics. Um, if you remember rightly, April was the the first month after the SDLT stampede, and yes, it had a massive impact on completion numbers, but I actually think there was a little bit of impact on new cases starting as well. I think April had a bit of a uh a boost in terms of new cases because literally everyone was focusing on the completion aspect uh in the month prior to that. So there was possibly a bit of pent-up um new instructions coming through that you know that perhaps meant that you know it's kind of showed the the 10% gap um from this April to last. But like I say, um overall a relatively you know uh improving position, albeit one that's down on on last year. Um but the completion uh numbers um and and analysis are completely different. Story um when we look at quarter two versus uh 25, uh quarter two, because that quarter volumes uh in that three-month period um were 23% up in terms of completions. Um but when you break it down month uh by month, April was 50% higher, um, May 14% higher, and June uh 6% higher. And I think you know, before we all start slapping each other on the back and and and popping a champagne course, we we have to understand why that why that is, because certainly we're not seeing a huge resurgence in in completions running up to this summer. It's more obviously when we look at the context of of where we were last year versus this, and as we know and have already mentioned, you know, the stampede in March meant that there were basically nothing left on the table in April to complete. So uh so that's why we're seeing a 50% improvement from April to April. And then also it's worth mentioning the fact that you know that that situation didn't resolve itself all in one month, and it's taken the entire quarter of 25 to kind of recover because of the the immature pipeline that that was created by the SDLT spike. So I would say um, yeah, it's great that numbers are so much higher than they were this time last year, but it's it's not because of an improved market in the last three months, it's purely down to what happened last year.

SPEAKER_02 9:29

Therein is the difficulty between you know making comparisons with previous years. Uh people may remember that the baseline for this report was 2019, uh a couple of years ago. It's now the the the previous year. Um but I mean that's just that's market dynamics for you, isn't it? What what's the view on sentiment and and data telling you about coming into the summer, which traditionally you sort of start to see a bit of that summer slowdown before we get that pickup in September? Do you think we've we've got that coming down the track?

SPEAKER_03 10:02

I think there will be a bit of an uptick, but I don't think it's going to be uh particularly significant. Basically, you know, we we know how long conveyancing transactions take uh on average for instruction to completion. So our current instruction numbers and the numbers that I've just quoted for for this quarter will obviously have a bearing on what we see in the next two to three months. So um, unfortunately, I don't think it's going to be like a huge bumper summer because you know, simply the cases aren't there to make it that way.

SPEAKER_02 10:34

It used to be the case that you could track market momentum through the year. You know, we knew that from January we sort of had this steady uplift and then it's sort of come down again and then back up again. You had this wave through the year. Is that gone? I mean, have we had too many government incentives and and too many interventions to be able to kind of see that over the past few years? Uh, you know, the dynamics of the market change, the length of time it takes to actually transact property, uh, or do you think we'll ever get back to that sort of traditional curve?

SPEAKER_03 11:04

Uh I'm sure Ben has a view as well, but I would say that that those they're definitely blurred. Um, I think it's a lot less predictable than it used to be. I mean, we always have the you know, the Christmas is always at the end of December, right? So we always know that December's going to be a quiet month, and then you hopefully see a bit of a bounce in the new year. Uh, and yeah, traditionally people you know tend to like to move um in the summer, you know, when kids are on holiday, that kind of stuff. Um, but yeah, I'd say it's because of the the current economic situation and obviously wars and stuff like that don't help. Um it's very, very difficult uh to kind of predict you know what what what's going to happen and and and and how uh big the the peaks and the troughs are gonna be. Uh and as you know, conveyancing you know gets killed as soon as we start seeing those peaks and troughs because it's incredibly difficult to um to manage you know pipelines when from a resourcing perspective when they vary so greatly.

SPEAKER_02 12:01

Well, I I think conveyances may well be looking at the current conditions and saying, actually, we're we're okay here, we're we're we're getting numbers through the door, we're getting completions through the door, we can manage these workloads reasonably well. And and of course, with the technology evolution kind of coming down the road as well, they may even have time to actually look into that and and effect that in their in their business. Whereas when they're constantly operating with peaks and troughs, you're you're firefighting the whole time.

SPEAKER_03 12:30

Funnily enough, you have you're absolutely right. And you know, we often talk about the completion to instruction ratio on this podcast, don't we? And um actually for the last six months, not just this last quarter, there's been um significantly less variance in that number between instructions and completions. Um and you know, that lack of variation does um create uh an element of calmness in certain you know in terms of the predictability of the conveyance and pipeline. Um and if if it's predictable and it's resourced correctly, then you're absolutely right. It's uh it's much easier to handle the you know the the throughput of cases and also as you say start looking ahead to what you know what what might be available in the market going forward to make things easier and more efficient when we're scrambling either because we're too busy or not busy enough, that those circumstances don't lend themselves to that kind of thinking.

SPEAKER_02 13:26

We make a lot of the resourcing issue in conveyancing. I mean, equally Ben estate agents have got the same sorts of issues, presumably.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

Yeah, and I think uh the same sort of sentiment, to be honest. I think although you know there's the general um seasonal pattern still, as Rob said, it comes up from January and does come up to spring for them in listings because listings then sell, and as you say, people move in the summer and we normally get a pump. Um, every time there's news of the extreme kind, I think access to information doesn't necessarily help with that because everything's extreme. Um, you know, there is an immediate reaction or response that the agents have to deal with, and and that's then a few weeks of of quiet phone lines, um, you know, panicking that we haven't got anything at the start and fighting for every sale or price reduction, and then suddenly people get used to it. And I think people are becoming a bit more immune because of so much information that they're just sort of carrying on now at a level, and I think agents can manage that, but they're seeing their pipelines have deteriorated and they're less certain. So that means less money coming down the track. And I think that's their future worry. So what we're seeing in response to that is yes, the time to look at options, um, the time to um spend time thinking, well, how do we make that pipeline more secure and and and and you know more certain, faster? How do we obviously um adjust the business to be more digital because we've got the tools to do that? Because if we don't, at these levels we're going to struggle. Um and the problem is now, these levels have been pretty similar for a while outside of SDFT. And certainly since you know the mini-budget, we've not really seen any exceptional peaks for a state agent. So that you know, that now's the time to change. And I think with obviously the recent announcements um on potential legislative reforms to help that happen more quickly, the majority have been pretty positive in their response to that because they know that one of the biggest pains for them is the uncertainty of income down the line. And in lower transaction times, that's even more painful. Whereas perhaps, again, post-COVID, when you're selling everything you've got and you've got a huge pipeline, you don't notice that it's falling through so much because you're getting enough money to cover the costs anyway. It's always when the bottom line's not there that you're really focused in and say, Well, what's going wrong here? Um, so there's an appetite, even outside of legislative reform, to make sure that um everything that comes through is treated like gold dust and gets through to a conclusion. Um so yeah, I think I think that's very similar challenges, but a chance to look at how they improve and then the market comes back and you make more money from everything you do is the hope.

SPEAKER_02 15:54

The elephant in the room with all of this is whether we get a burn and bounce. Uh I'm not going to ask you to predict that. When we reconvene in three months' time, perhaps we can see whether there's any evidence uh of that. But as ever, great to have you uh both on the podcast and sharing your insights. It's a slightly shortened version of the podcast, isn't it? Uh this this episode. Uh and um we will see what happens uh over the course of the next few months. The Today's Conveyancer Podcast is available on your preferred podcast provider. It's also available on today'sconveyancer.co.uk. My thanks to Ben and to Rob. Thank you as ever for listening. And we'll see you again soon.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

You're listening to the Today's Conveyancer Podcast, the leading source of information for residential property lawyers in England and Wales. Don't forget to subscribe and sign up to our free newsletter at today'sconveyancer.co.uk. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.