Prepare for this.

The 104-day wait is yours to prepare for.

If you've accepted an offer on your home, you're facing a wait. The average time from an accepted offer to exchange of contracts in the UK is now 104 days. That's from late April through August. That's five months of a sale that isn't settled, a mortgage offer with an expiry date, and life plans held hostage to a process you can't fully control.

It wasn't always this way. In 2019, the wait was 76 days. In the early 2010s, it was around 60. The system hasn't deliberately been made slower. It's just drifted that way. More complex transactions. More councils in search delays. Conveyancers managing larger caseloads. Chains where progress at one end depends on progress at every other end. Each actor doing their job correctly, and still, the whole process has nearly doubled in length.

Nearly one in five home sales now take more than six months to exchange. That's not an edge case. That's a routine possibility.

What matters more than the number itself is what happens during those 104 days. The longer the wait, the more things can go wrong. And the data from this week makes clear that they do.

A third of failed sales aren't about the property.

When a home sale falls through, the headline usually isn't hard to spot: a survey turned up problems, the chain broke, the buyer's mortgage fell apart. But new analysis of UK fall-throughs in the first quarter of 2026 shows a different pattern. Nearly 1 in 3 agreed home sales that collapsed did so for one reason: the buyer simply changed their mind.

Not a structural defect. Not a market move. Not anything about the house itself. The buyer agreed, started the process, and then — somewhere in the weeks that followed — they decided they no longer wanted to go through with it.

When does this happen? Fast. Thirty-eight percent of all fall-throughs occur within the first four weeks of an offer being agreed. Before the survey is instructed. Before searches are returned. Before the formal complexity has even begun. The buyer goes quiet, and then they're gone.

What makes a buyer change their mind in week three, when the house was still the right house in week one? The answer doesn't appear in the survey report or the legal searches. It appears in the silence. In questions that take days or weeks to get answers to. In an information gap that, left unfilled, quietly becomes doubt.

Surveys are a close second. Just over a third of collapses happen after the buyer's surveyor has been through the house and found something — something that makes the buyer nervous, or that opens a conversation the seller wasn't ready to have. Again, 38% of these happen in the first four weeks, in that narrow window when the deal is fragile and buyer confidence is still forming.

For leaseholders, the numbers are worse.

If you're selling a flat, you're selling in the hardest leasehold market on record. The average leasehold sale takes 155 days to exchange — nearly three times the freehold average. In 2025, 43% of leasehold sales didn't complete at all. The failures are happening late: after months of legal work, surveys completed, moving plans pencilled in, sometimes after people have already begun their onward move.

The King's Speech last week confirmed that leasehold reform is coming — commonhold as the default, ground rents capped, more protection for leaseholders. It's real, and it's been 14 years in the making. It matters. But it won't take effect until 2028 or 2029. Right now, if you're selling a flat, you're selling in the worst year on record, and the reform that would improve your buyer's position is still years away.

Why do leasehold sales collapse so often? Because there are more moving parts. The lease length. The ground rent. The service charge history. The managing agent's response times. The buildings insurance. Whether the building has a major works bill coming. These aren't small details — they're the things buyers get nervous about, and they're the things that take time to locate and explain, and the longer it takes, the more nervous a buyer becomes.

You can't control the system's pace.

Sellers often think their role in the process is passive. You've accepted an offer, now you wait. The conveyancers will handle it. The solicitors will handle it. Your estate agent will keep you posted. And you sit and watch as the sale drifts — 104 days, or 155 days if you're selling a flat, or maybe six months or more, watching the calendar and wondering what's slowing things down, whether the chain is stalling, whether your buyer is losing faith.

Most of what makes the system slow isn't in your control. The council search delays. The conveyancer's caseload. The mortgage lender's response times. The other sellers and buyers in the chain. You can't speed any of that up.

But some of what slows a sale down is in your control. Not the system's pace — but your pace. The speed at which you can answer questions. The information you have ready. The documents a solicitor will need and how quickly you can find them. Whether your buyer is waiting for answers or receiving them. Whether doubt is accumulating or being cleared.

A prepared seller — one who knows exactly what questions are coming and has the answers ready — doesn't speed up the 104-day system. But they don't become the reason it stalls. They don't slow it further. They move through it faster than the average, not because they're lucky, but because they're not a bottleneck.

Preparation isn't fixing everything.

Getting ready for a sale doesn't mean you have to repair every crack or replace every dated fixture. It means understanding what your buyer will ask about — what a surveyor will flag, what a buyer's solicitor will need, what points of uncertainty you can clear up before they become reasons to doubt.

You know the things about your property that you've gotten used to. The boiler that's getting older. The crack in the corner of the living room. The patch of damp that comes back when it rains hard. The extension that was done in 2008 without a building regulation certificate. The flat roof that was due for replacement five years ago. These aren't secrets. They're just normal parts of owning an older home. But they're also the things that, if not explained clearly and early, become reasons for a buyer to get nervous.

The question a prepared seller answers on day three is answered much more powerfully than the same question asked by a buyer's solicitor on day 45. One is a conversation between people who want the same thing. The other is a complication, a holdout, a sign that something was being hidden.

This is what preparation buys you. Not a perfect house. A house that is understood. A house where the buyer knows what they're getting, and can make a decision from there — whether to proceed, to renegotiate, or to walk away. But a decision, not a slow erosion of faith.

The 104-day wait is a test of what you prepared for.

You're facing 104 days from accepted offer to exchange. Longer if you're selling a flat. The data this week makes clear what's likely to happen during that time. Your buyer's surveyor will find something. Your buyer might go quiet. Questions will come up that you're not prepared for. A solicitor will ask for documents that take weeks to locate. And all of it — every delay, every silence, every "let me find that and get back to you" — is time for doubt to grow.

The sellers who move through the process faster than the average aren't the lucky ones. They're the ones who knew what was coming and got ready before the process began. They're not inventing answers in week seven. They're explaining things they've already thought through. They're not losing their buyer in week four because the buyer went quiet. They're not the reason the chain slowed.

The 104-day wait is yours to prepare for.