A firm of conveyancing solicitors has published a league table of the property types that take the longest to buy and sell, judged by the legal work involved. Most of the property types on the list are ones we regularly help owners sell at auction, so we have looked at each one in turn.
On 10 September 2026, Estate Agent Today reported on a league table from Lyons Bowe Solicitors ranking nine types of property by the amount of conveyancing work they typically involve for the buyer's conveyancer. Paul Lyons, the firm's managing director, summed it up: "What might initially look like a relatively straightforward purchase can have all sorts of complex legal arrangements hiding behind the scenes." Or, as he put it more memorably, "the most complicated part of a house isn't the one you can see."
The firm is careful to say that a longer conveyancing process does not automatically mean something has gone wrong. Sometimes there is simply more to investigate, more paperwork to review and more parties involved. That is fair. It is also the root of the problem for anyone selling one of these properties through an estate agent. All of that investigation happens after you accept an offer, one buyer at a time, and nothing is legally binding while it goes on. If the buyer loses patience, changes their mind or fails to get a mortgage, you are back to square one with a sale that has fallen through.
The top of the list came as no surprise to us. Over the past year we have noticed a steady rise in enquiries from owners looking to sell complex leasehold flats at auction, often after a private treaty (estate agency) sale has dragged on for months and then collapsed.
The league table at a glance
Here are the nine property types in the order Lyons Bowe ranked them, with the firm's assessment of the potential conveyancing workload for each:
| Property type | Conveyancing workload |
|---|---|
| 1. Leasehold flat in a higher-risk or complex building | Very high |
| 2. Shared ownership property | Very high |
| 3. Complex leasehold flat | High |
| 4. New-build property | High |
| 5. Leasehold house | High |
| 6. Freehold property with estate charges | Medium to high |
| 7. Listed or significantly altered property | Medium to high |
| 8. Unregistered, defective or unusual title | Medium to very high |
| 9. Standard freehold terrace, semi-detached or detached house | Low |
Source: Lyons Bowe Solicitors, reported by Estate Agent Today, 10 September 2026. The ranking reflects typical legal, title, leasehold, management and third-party issues, not measured transaction times.
At auction the work does not disappear, it moves
It would be easy to claim that auction makes all of this complexity go away. It does not. A leasehold flat in a complex building needs its lease reviewed, its management pack obtained and its building safety position established whichever way it is sold. What changes at auction is when that work happens.
In an auction sale, the seller's solicitor prepares an auction legal pack before anyone can bid. It contains the title, the searches, the lease and management information, the property information forms and the special conditions of sale. Every interested buyer, or their solicitor, reads the same pack in the weeks before the auction. When the hammer falls the highest bidder exchanges contracts, pays a 10% deposit and completes 28 days later.
That changes three things for the seller of a complicated property:
- The paperwork is gathered once, not once per buyer. In a private treaty (estate agency) sale, if the first buyer drops out after three months of enquiries, the second buyer's solicitor largely starts again from the beginning. At auction, the pack serves every bidder.
- The legal work is done before the sale. A slow managing agent or a council search backlog delays the date the property goes to auction, but the property is not ready to sell without those documents anyway. At auction, there are no false starts, no going under offer and waiting for the buyer's solicitor to find a problem months later.
- The price cannot be chipped afterwards. The buyer has read the pack before bidding, so a high service charge or a missing consent is already priced into their bid. Once the hammer falls, contracts are exchanged, so there is no opportunity to renegotiate.
Selling a leasehold flat: estate agent versus auction
This chart shows how long it typically takes to sell the same leasehold flat by each route and, more importantly, how long the seller waits with nothing legally binding. The bars are in weeks from the day you instruct a solicitor or an agent, and the green marker is the point at which the buyer is committed.
A wait for a buyer (shown here as 4 weeks, often longer), then typically 5 months or more from accepted offer to completion while the lease, management pack and building enquiries are raised for one buyer. Nothing is binding until the last couple of weeks.
3 to 4 weeks assembling the legal pack (lease, management pack, searches, safety documents), 3 to 4 weeks of marketing, contracts exchange on auction day, completion 28 days later.
Weeks from instructing a solicitor or an agent.
- Preparing the legal pack (auction) or waiting for a buyer (agent)
- Marketing and bidding
- Exchange (legally binding)
- Exchange to completion
- Nothing is binding yet
The auction bar is longer than it would be for a freehold house, because the legal pack for a complex leasehold flat takes longer to assemble. The point is that the extra weeks sit at the start, before anyone bids, rather than after an offer where they can end in a collapsed sale.
The auction advantage does, however, depend on the pack being complete. If the management pack or the fire safety documents are missing on auction day, bidders' solicitors will flag the gaps, cautious bidders will stay away and the price will suffer. For the properties near the top of this list, the legal pack matters more than anything else in the sale. Our guide sets out the extra documents needed for each property type, a seller's checklist, and the mistakes that cost sellers money.
The league table, property by property
Here is how each of the nine property types fares in an estate agency sale, and what changes when it is sold by unconditional auction.
1. Leasehold flat in a higher-risk or complex building
Conveyancing workload: very high
Lyons Bowe puts this at the top of the league table for good reason. As well as the lease itself, a buyer's conveyancer needs the management pack, service charge accounts and buildings insurance, then fire and building safety enquiries under the Building Safety Act, and then whatever the buyer's mortgage lender asks for. The article contains a striking admission from the conveyancers themselves: the building safety rules are so involved that many conveyancers will not take on this work at all.
At auction, all of this paperwork goes into the legal pack ahead of the sale: the lease, the LPE1 management pack, the insurance schedule, the fire risk assessment, and the EWS1 form or leaseholder deed of certificate where one exists. The buyers who bid on these flats are mostly cash investors and landlords who do not need a lender's sign-off, which removes one of the biggest sources of delay in an estate agency sale. See our guide to selling a leasehold flat at auction.
2. Shared ownership property
Conveyancing workload: very high
Shared ownership adds a housing association to every conversation, plus staircasing provisions, resale and nomination rules, rent and service charges, and the lender's requirements as well. There are simply more parties who have to agree before anything moves.
This is the one entry on the list where we would not automatically suggest auction. Most shared ownership leases give the housing association a nomination period during which it can find a buyer itself, and restrict who is eligible to purchase, which sits awkwardly with an open auction. Where the owner has staircased to 100% and the property is a conventional leasehold flat, auction usually works in the normal way. If not, speak to the housing association first about its resale process.
3. Complex leasehold flat
Conveyancing workload: high
Even without building safety issues, a leasehold flat sale depends on information from outside the transaction, from the freeholder or managing agent: service charge accounts, planned major works, ground rent and covenants. As Lyons Bowe notes, progress depends on those third parties supplying what is asked for. Some of them are slow.
At auction, the seller's solicitor gathers this information before the property goes on sale, not after an offer is accepted. A slow managing agent can still delay the auction date, but the sale itself does not fall apart while you wait. With an estate agent, a quick offer followed by months of waiting for the management pack is a false economy.
Short leases and defective leases are classic auction stock in their own right, and the buyers who compete for them price the lease as it stands. See selling a short lease flat and selling a flat with a defective lease, and our recent update on leasehold reform in 2026.
4. New-build property
Conveyancing workload: high
A brand-new home looks like the simplest purchase of all, but the paperwork says otherwise: developer documentation, planning agreements, estate arrangements, warranties, and the adoption of roads and sewers, often on a more complex title structure than an older house.
Developers rarely sell first-hand at auction, but resales of recent new-builds do come up, typically from investors disposing of a flat or a small portfolio. The developer's documents, planning agreements and warranties all go into the pack, so the buyer sees the estate charge and the state of the road adoption before bidding rather than discovering them three months in.
5. Leasehold house
Conveyancing workload: high
Not all houses are freehold. Around 8% of houses in England, roughly 1.5 million, are leasehold, according to the government's latest leasehold dwellings statistics. A leasehold house can carry ground rent, covenants, estate management arrangements and unusual title provisions that a buyer would not expect on a conventional freehold home.
Reform is on the way for leasehold houses, but that does not help an owner who needs to sell this year. The lease, the ground rent position and any estate management information all sit in the auction pack, and the buyer bids on the property as it is, with the option of extending the lease or buying the freehold afterwards.
6. Freehold property with estate charges
Conveyancing workload: medium to high
Freehold does not always mean free of obligations. Many newer estates have a management company, an annual estate charge, covenants and restrictions, all of which the buyer's conveyancer has to investigate. Buyers can face the same information requests as on a managed leasehold development.
In the auction pack, the management company details, the estate charge accounts and the covenants are set out openly, so the annual charge is a known figure before the first bid, rather than a nasty surprise afterwards.
7. Listed or significantly altered property
Conveyancing workload: medium to high
Period homes come with history, and history means checks: planning permissions, listed building consents, building regulations for past work, and evidence for alterations made decades ago that nobody documented at the time. As Lyons Bowe puts it, the more complicated the history, the more there may be to investigate.
Where the paperwork for an old extension or a knocked-through wall simply does not exist, the auction pack says so, and the special conditions or an indemnity policy deal with it up front. The renovators and developers who buy this kind of property at auction expect gaps of this sort and price them in. See selling an unmodernised property.
8. Unregistered, defective or unusual title
Conveyancing workload: medium to very high
Title is the legal foundation of the purchase, so an unregistered, defective or unusual title can mean examining ownership rights, covenants, boundaries and easements from scratch. The workload varies enormously from one case to the next, and mortgage lenders are wary of anything out of the ordinary.
Unusual titles are auction territory. The seller's solicitor puts the original deeds and an epitome of title into the pack for an unregistered property, together with any statutory declaration on possession or boundaries. Most auction buyers are cash buyers, so they are not dependent on a lender's view of the title. Our guide to selling a flat with a lost or missing lease covers one common version of this problem.
9. Standard freehold terrace, semi-detached or detached house
Conveyancing workload: low
At the other end of the scale is a freehold house with a clear registered title and no landlord, lease or managing agent to investigate. Lyons Bowe is right that this is the simplest starting point, though even here an estate agency sale typically takes several months from offer to completion once a chain is involved.
This is the quickest auction sale of all. The pack can often be ready in 1 to 3 weeks, and once the auction is booked, completion in about 6 to 8 weeks is realistic. Our guide to how long it takes to sell a house at auction compares the routes side by side.
Auction already does what the government's reforms are aiming for
None of this is lost on the government. Its home buying and selling reforms centre on two ideas: information provided upfront, before an offer is made, and a binding commitment earlier in the process. Solicitors have pushed back on the extra work and the liability involved, and the reforms themselves are still years away. Both ideas simply describe how an unconditional auction already works. The legal pack is upfront information. The fall of the hammer is the binding commitment.
For the property types near the top of the Lyons Bowe list, that is the whole argument. The complexity is real and it is not going away. The question is whether that legal work gets done after accepting an offer, one buyer at a time, with no guarantee of a sale at the end. Or once at the start, with a sale to a buyer who cannot walk away.
All of this applies only to unconditional auctions
The speed and certainty described here belong to the traditional, unconditional auction, whether on the day or in the extended online format. The so-called "modern method of auction" is a conditional auction: the winning bidder pays a reservation fee for a 28 or 56 day exclusivity period and only exchanges contracts later, within that period, if at all. The enquiries, the lender and the risk of a collapsed sale all come back in. Our guide explains the difference between unconditional and conditional auctions, and why we recommend the former.
Next steps
If your property is on this list and you are weighing up how to sell it, we can tell you quickly whether auction is likely to suit it and what it might fetch. Request a free pre-auction appraisal or call us on 0800 862 0206 - we'll be happy to help.
