A UK property sale now takes 120 days on average, from the accepted offer to completion. That number has risen a lot. It shows the delays that the conveyancing process contains. 60% of UK homebuyers are involved in a chain when they buy. A quarter have experienced a 2-month or longer delay. 60% have considered abandoning a purchase because of chain problems. Sales progression software exists specifically to manage the information flow that makes these delays worse than they need to be.
Sales progression is the process of managing a property transaction from offer acceptance through to exchange and completion. The estate agent usually holds all of this together. They chase solicitors. They pass messages along the chain. They follow searches, surveys and mortgage offers. They keep everybody on the same dates.
The most commonly cited root causes of delays, in order of frequency:
A seller can fill in the property forms before the home goes on the market. Those are TA6, TA10, and TA7 for leasehold. Most sellers do it after they accept an offer. Doing it first saves 4 to 6 weeks between the offer and the exchange. The same applies to ordering local searches before offer acceptance (some agents and solicitors now offer "search ordered" packs for properties).
Trading Standards calls this "material information". Its guidance tells estate agents to put the key facts about a property in the listing from the start. The BASPI (Buying and Selling Property Information) form was designed to standardise this. Agents who help sellers prepare these documents before marketing are both complying with Trading Standards requirements and reducing their own post-offer progression timeline.
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Sales progression is primarily an information management problem. The agent must know where every sale stands. Which documents have moved. What is still missing. Who has been chased, and when. There can be dozens of live sales at once. Without a system, this happens in email threads, notebook entries, and memory.
Sales progression tools in an estate agent CRM give you:
Modern CRMs like Reapit, Street, and Dezrez have built-in sales progression tracking. The OnTheMarket TecHub product did exactly this work. It closed in June 2025. Every agent who used it had to move to another tool.
The chain is the slowest part of a sale, and no agent can see all of it. The reason is not effort. It is the shape of the market.
Each agency in the chain runs a different product. Each product holds its own idea of a sale, a buyer and a solicitor. Two systems cannot agree on which sale is which, so nobody can join the chain together. The telephone fills the gap.
A shared foundation removes that gap. Every system built on engage.re holds a sale, a buyer, a seller and a solicitor in the same declared form. Each record has a permanent identifier. Two agencies can then agree on which sale they both hold. Each side can give the other a narrow view of one chain, and the system logs it. Neither gives up its data, and neither gives up its system.
That is what an interoperable market means in practice. We explain it in what does an interoperable software market look like. We show how a sector builds on one foundation in bespoke software for a whole sector.
Solicitors working on a transaction need access to the same information the agent holds. Some platforms give the solicitor a portal of their own. The solicitor can see the chain, send documents, and set their own stage. The agent does not have to telephone. This reduces the volume of "just chasing on" calls in both directions and creates a shared record of the transaction status.
Anti-money laundering verification is a legal requirement for solicitors. Everybody in a sale must prove who they are. That means buyers, sellers, and sometimes executors or attorneys. More agents now do this with digital ID tools that connect to the CRM. Agents who handle this upfront for their clients before the solicitor requires it remove one administrative step from the conveyancing process.
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You can see this in a working system. The ESRE live estate agent demo opens with no login, and it shows the sales progression work in this guide. Sign in as negotiator and progress the sale through the chain view, or as vendor and see the offer status. It is a working system, not a screenshot.