Good news,
bad timing.

There is a particular kind of government announcement that arrives with the smell of justice finally served and lands in the lives of the people it was meant to help rather like a postcard confirming that the rescue ship is on its way — scheduled to arrive sometime in 2029.

Thursday's King's Speech was exactly that. Leasehold reform — genuinely, substantively, finally — is coming. The Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill will ban new leasehold flats, make commonhold the default tenure for apartment buildings, and cap ground rents at £250 a year. Fourteen years of campaigning by homeowners, journalists, and a remarkably persistent parliamentary committee. Real progress. A good thing, without question.

And if you are currently trying to sell your leasehold flat, it will not help your sale one jot.

This is not a criticism of the government, or of reform, or of anyone in particular. It is simply the nature of legislation: it takes time to pass, time to be enacted, time to percolate down to the solicitors and managing agents and conveyancers who determine what your purchase actually looks like on the ground. The earliest anyone expects full effect: somewhere around 2028. In the meantime, also this week, came the following figure.

For the first time ever, the overall UK average for all property sales — leasehold and freehold combined — has crossed 100 days. 104, to be precise. The rescue ship is a long way off. The water, right now, is up to your knees.

Here's what 155 days actually means in practice. It means that if a buyer knocked on your door last Tuesday, fell in love with your flat, and made an offer you accepted — you would, on current averages, be exchanging contracts somewhere around mid-October. Five months of your life spent in the peculiar suspended animation of the agreed-but-not-yet-sold: you can't list the property again, you can't fully commit to your next move, you can't stop the lease clock ticking or the service charges accumulating. You just wait, checking your inbox, wondering whether the solicitor on the other side is actually alive.

And 43% of the time, it doesn't complete anyway. Nearly half of all leasehold sales that reach offer stage collapse before the end. Most do so late — not in week two, when everyone's still optimistic and nobody's paid anything yet, but around weeks eight, ten, eleven. After surveys have been commissioned. After solicitors have been engaged. After you've told your children they're changing schools and started quietly looking at sofas. After the point where it properly hurts.

The reasons are almost always the same: something about the lease that the buyer didn't anticipate. A ground rent clause that makes the property unmortgageable with certain lenders. A lease that's shorter than it appears once you factor in the statutory extension process. A managing agent whose response times are measured in geological time rather than working days. These aren't revelations to the seller. They're just things that were never addressed at the start, because nobody asked — and by the time someone did, it was too late to do anything about it smoothly.

The leasehold story is particularly sharp this week, but there's a parallel truth that applies to everyone selling a property in England and Wales right now — not just flat owners, but sellers of houses, semis, terraces, the lot.

New Q1 2026 data from Quick Move Now reveals that 37.5% of all agreed UK home sales that collapsed this year did so because of what the buyer's surveyor found. Not a mortgage problem. Not a chain breaking somewhere upstream. Not a buyer who got cold feet on a Friday evening and had a change of heart over the weekend. The survey. A professional with a damp meter and a conservatively worded report, walking around a home the seller has lived in for years, finding things that were always there.

That last part is worth sitting with. The damp patch at the back of the bedroom that appeared after two wet winters. The crack running through the render on the bay window, which you've had looked at twice and been told is cosmetic. The flat roof over the kitchen extension that has been a topic of quiet domestic conversation for the better part of three years. Sellers know these things exist. What they don't know is how a surveyor will grade them — Level 2 or Level 3, advisory note or action required — and what the buyer will make of it when the report lands in their inbox on a Thursday morning.

They find out in the worst possible way: when the estate agent calls.

"The buyer's had the survey back. They're asking for £18,000 off."

Or: "The buyer's pulled out. Something about the roof."

There is nothing particularly malicious in any of this. The buyer is not being unreasonable. The surveyor is doing exactly the job they were paid to do. The system isn't designed to produce this outcome — it is simply, in the specific way that British institutions sometimes are, not designed well enough to prevent it.

Take a step back and the week's property news describes a coherent picture, even if it's not particularly comfortable. A market that is simultaneously reforming and struggling. A government that has taken a genuine and welcome step on leasehold tenure, while the people most directly affected are currently navigating the longest, most fragile transaction window on record. A survey system that functions as a landmine in the middle of the sale process, reliably detonating for more than a third of completed negotiations.

The buyer demand picture isn't helping either. RICS data for April 2026 puts the net balance of buyer demand at −34%. That means significantly more surveyed agents are reporting falling demand than rising demand. The market is moving — it's not seized up — but buyers have choices, and choices breed caution, and caution breeds surveys, and surveys find things.

None of which is to say that selling a home in the UK in 2026 is impossible. Many hundreds of thousands of people will do exactly that this year, and most of them will eventually get where they're going. The data describes a system under strain, not a system at a standstill.

The leasehold reform, for all that its benefits are future-tense, is not nothing. The capping of ground rents will remove one of the most commonly cited reasons that buyers get cold feet on leasehold purchases. The move to commonhold will, over time, change the nature of flat ownership in England and Wales in ways that make transactions cleaner, simpler, and less prone to the kind of last-minute discoveries that currently kill 43% of leasehold sales. That's genuinely significant. It took fourteen years, but here it is.

And the survey problem — dramatic as the numbers are — has a partial, practical solution that doesn't require waiting for anyone in Parliament to do anything. It is simply this: knowing what's in your property before someone else tells your buyer. Not hiding defects. Not pretending things that are there aren't there. Just understanding, in advance, what a buyer's surveyor is likely to flag, so that when the moment arrives, nothing lands as a surprise. The sellers who navigate the process most smoothly are almost always the ones who spent time at the outset asking the questions that were always going to come up eventually — and who had already decided, calmly and without the pressure of a deal in jeopardy, what to fix, what to price for, and what to be upfront about from day one.

The UK property market is not broken beyond use. It is, however, reliably unkind to the unprepared. It rewards the people who went in knowing what they were dealing with. That's not a comforting observation, exactly — but it is a useful one. And in a market this slow and this fragile, useful is what we're after.