Market. Re-sourced September 2026
The UK residential market agrees more than a million sales a year and abandons nearly a quarter of them after the offer is accepted. The collapses cluster in the weeks when nobody has yet checked whether the buyer can proceed. That window is the market HomeBid sells into.
What the numbers say
TwentyEA Property and Homemover data and the House Buyer Bureau's cost analysis, all 2025 to 2026. Full source table at the foot of this page.
Why it matters for HomeBid
Timing
More than a third of collapses occur in the weeks HomeBid's verification would already have completed. Moving identity, source of funds, source of wealth and PEP and sanctions checks in front of acceptance addresses the failure at its source rather than reporting it afterwards.
Cost
Housebuilders are sellers at scale. A cancelled reservation on a new-build plot costs re-marketing, delay on a completion-driven cash flow and the working capital tied up in a finished home.
Speed
A transaction that starts with a verified buyer and a PDTF-conformant sales pack removes the first month of the conveyancer's work, which is the month in which most deals die.
Market sizing
Addressable is the front-of-funnel value of every UK residential transaction at HomeBid's pricing. Serviceable is the slice HomeBid can reach first. Obtainable is what the Base case actually claims.
Addressable
per year. 1.13 million UK residential transactions forecast for 2026, at HomeBid's front-of-funnel value of about £600 a deal. Resale is not in the current plan; the figure shows what the front-of-funnel is worth across the whole market.
Serviceable
per year. Private new-build sales through COINS-using housebuilders at £604 a plot. Two inputs are assumptions until confirmed, so the figure is carried as a range of £34M to £47M.
Obtainable
chargeable reservations in the 2029 Base case across 61 live sites and 15 developers, about 2% of the serviceable market. The pilot customer alone, at 250 units in 2027, is about 0.4% of it.
| Serviceable market arithmetic | Value | Status |
|---|---|---|
| New-build completions per year, all tenures | c. 170,000 | To verify: MHCLG housing supply statistics |
| Private sale share of completions | 55% to 65% | Assumption; the balance is affordable and build-to-rent |
| Share sold by COINS-using housebuilders | 60% to 70% | To verify: Access Group and COINS material |
| Private new-build plots in reach | 56,000 to 77,000 | Derived |
| Front-of-funnel value per plot sold | £604 | From the model: subscription plus per-deal fee, per plot, at 0.55 reservations a week |
| Serviceable market per year | £34M to £47M | Derived; carried as c. £40M |
The two "to verify" lines are the ones that move the figure. They are carried in the model's Sources sheet with that status and are not used externally until confirmed. The April 2026 materials quoted a £1.74bn addressable and £550M serviceable market on a basis that included conveyancing, broker and insurance revenue HomeBid no longer claims; those figures are withdrawn.
How the serviceable market is reached
Housebuilders sell through outlets. Volume builders report net private sales of 0.67 to 0.76 per outlet per week; boutique and timber-frame sites run slower, which is why the model uses 0.55 for developers signed after the pilot customer and founder-stated unit counts for the pilot customer itself. A typical outlet therefore reserves 25 to 40 homes a year, and a developer with four outlets is worth £69k a year at list price.
Each reservation today involves a reservation form, a deposit taken by the developer, an AML check ordered by the developer or its panel firm after the fact, and a sales pack assembled by hand for the conveyancer. Cancellations are reported by the listed builders as a routine cost of sale. HomeBid replaces the after-the-fact check with a gate before acceptance and the hand-assembled pack with a schema-validated one, inside the sales process the developer already runs in COINS.
Sales are founder-led into existing COINS relationships. The Base case signs two further developers in 2027, six in 2028 and six in 2029, with two to six outlets each. No paid acquisition is assumed and no consumer demand needs to be created: the developer brings the buyers.
Why now
Nothing in the Base case depends on policy landing. Each of these makes verified, upfront, standards-conformant transaction data more valuable.
Housing supply
The government's target for this Parliament puts new-build sales capacity, not only build capacity, under pressure. Every additional completion needs a qualified buyer and a clean handoff to a conveyancer.
Home buying reform
MHCLG's reform programme moves searches and property information to the point of listing and standardises the data that follows a transaction. A PDTF-conformant sales pack at reservation is that direction of travel, built now.
New Homes Quality Code
Transparent, documented sales processes and reservation terms are a compliance matter for housebuilders. A timestamped qualification and acceptance record is the kind of evidence the code asks for.
Building Safety Act
Digital records that follow a building through its life. The twin carries the sales-stage slice of that record in an open, portable standard rather than a PDF in an email.
Open banking
Bank-sourced balance data replaces screenshots. HomeBid pairs it with explicit source of funds and source of wealth capture, because a balance is not a source.
Digital identity
The UK digital identity and attributes trust framework and HMLR's Practice Guide 81 set the bar for identity in property. HomeBid's checks are aligned with PG81; certification evidence is a pilot-phase deliverable.
Competitive landscape
The settlement rails and the conveyancers are destinations that start where HomeBid stops. The adjacent tools do one part of the job, later, and outside the developer's sales flow.
| Who | What they do | Relationship to HomeBid |
|---|---|---|
| PEXA, Coadjute | Settlement and completion rails, bank-backed | Destination. They start at acceptance; we hand them a verified package. A rail could compete for origination, which is why downstream ingestion is validated in the pilot before anything scales. |
| Panel conveyancers | Complete the transaction | Destination. Our package is their accelerant, not their customer due diligence; they re-verify under their own obligations. |
| Identity and AML check providers | Point checks ordered by a firm after acceptance | Adjacent and suppliers. HomeBid runs the checks before acceptance, inside the developer's sales flow. |
| New-build reservation and CRM tools | Reservation forms and pipeline for sales teams | Adjacent. No verification gate, no ERP origination, no handoff standard. |
| Agent CRMs and chain-visibility tools | Resale pipeline and chain tracking | Adjacent. Different market and stage. |
| HomeBid | Qualification, verification and handoff, originated from the housebuilder's ERP | The moat is the qualification gate plus the COINS embed, not the twin format, which is an open standard by design. |
Sources
Verified means checked against the cited source in September 2026. Items marked to verify are carried in Financial Model v3.0's Sources sheet with that status and are not used externally until confirmed.
| Statistic | Value | Source | Date | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UK fall-through rate | 23.7% (Inner London 27.0%) | TwentyEA, via PropertyWire and The Negotiator | Q1 2026 | Verified |
| Fall-throughs within four weeks of sale agreed | 38%; nearly 16% within two weeks | TwentyEA, via PropertyWire | Apr 2026 | Verified |
| Annual fall-throughs, 12 months to Sept 2025 | 312,700 | TwentyEA and Ci, via The Negotiator | Oct 2025 | Verified |
| Average cost of a fall-through to the seller | £3,544 | House Buyer Bureau, via Today's Conveyancer | Q1 2026 | Verified |
| Average time to exchange | 123 days (4.1 months) | TwentyEA, via The Negotiator and Estate Agent Today | Q4 2025 | Verified |
| Transactions taking over six months to exchange | 60.8% | TwentyEA, via The Negotiator | Aug 2026 | Verified |
| UK residential transactions forecast | 1.13 million (2026) | TwentyEA revised forecast, via The Negotiator | Jun 2026 | Verified |
| Housebuilder net private sales rate benchmark | 0.67 to 0.76 per outlet per week | Persimmon AGM trading statement; broker note | Apr to Aug 2026 | Verified |
| Government housing target | 1.5 million homes over the Parliament | MHCLG | 2024 onward | Verified, policy |
| New-build completions per year | c. 170,000, all tenures | MHCLG housing supply statistics | n/a | To verify |
| Share of housebuilders using COINS | 60% to 70% | Access Group and COINS material | n/a | To verify |
| £8.6bn lost to failed transactions; £8bn fees; 27 steps; 29% fall-through; 160 days; £1.74bn and £550M market figures | n/a | Previously cited in April 2026 materials | 2025 to Apr 2026 | Withdrawn |
The full Market Analysis v3 (five pages) is in the data room.
About 2% of a serviceable market that exists today, from one supply source HomeBid can trigger. Full analysis and sources in the data room.