Home buyers failed to take up £32.4 billion worth of mortgages last year, partly due to worsening fall-throughs of property sales.
Novus Strategy analysed the latest Bank of England data for Monetary Financial Institutions (MFIs) released on Friday, which revealed that mortgage cancellations climbed 36.4%, the largest annual jump in value in four years, with lenders contending with 134,057 cancellations in 2025, up 26.4% in 12 months.
Delays increase the chances that career moves, life events, a lack of upfront property information, and changing credit and financial circumstances cause chains to collapse. Combined with the impact of abandoned purchases on estate agents and mortgage brokers, the overall cost to UK business is estimated to run into billions of pounds each year.
These avoidable fall-throughs have been getting worse. Recent data released by TwentyCi show there were 303,538 fall-throughs of property transactions in 2025, an increase of 4.5% on the previous year. This is despite new instructions and agreed sales rising just 2.3% and 2.1% respectively last year, according to the company.
The rising number of cancellations came as the number of mortgage approvals for home purchase increased 5.1% to 876,458 last year. They were worth a combined £216.8 billion in 2025 (up 11.1%), which would equate to a cancellation rate of 14.9% by value, though there is a lag between approvals and cancellations.
Over the last few years, mortgage lenders have invested in shortening their ‘time to offer’ but this has limited impact on the speed at which most transactions progress. Now, ‘time to completion’ is the new battleground and the industry is already taking steps to quicken the home buying process and bring cancellations down.
Technology platforms, the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG), Land Registry and industry bodies such as the Open Property Data Association (OPDA) are all working towards a world where open data standards and trust frameworks allow transactions to complete faster, with reusable permissions, qualified electronic signatures and upfront property information.
Claire Van der Zant, CEO of Novus Strategy, said: “Avoidable fall-throughs cost the property industry as a whole billions of pounds a year and lenders will want to see these numbers coming down.
“While the myriad reasons that property transactions fall through may sound uncontrollable, the most powerful thing we can do to mitigate this is increase the speed at which transactions can complete. Everyone in the industry is acutely aware of this and it relies on moving out of the first phase of transformation, where business focused on internal digitalisation, to the second phase where we horizontally integrate for interoperability.
“This second phase is already happening through the work of MHCLG, DPMSG, OPDA and CFIT. Together, the industry is rewriting the fabric of the home buying industry using data standards, trust frameworks and smart data pilots. The acid test will be that transaction times become a customer choice, not an excruciating six months of uncertainty."
