"The real estate sector is at a critical juncture. With macroeconomic turmoil looming overseas, there is a danger that a drop in market confidence could derail growth in the property sector"
- Andrew Lloyd - Search Acumen
The volume of property transactions across Britain remained subdued during the 2024/25 financial year, but new data reveals that real estate lawyers are handling more cases on average, driven in part by a shrinking pool of active firms.
Search Acumen’s latest analysis, based on HM Land Registry data, recorded 992,024 completed residential and commercial transactions between April 2024 and March 2025. This represents a modest 3.5% annual increase. However, activity remains 22.2% below levels seen two years ago, when the market experienced a post-pandemic surge.
Contributing to this dynamic is a sustained contraction in the number of law firms handling property transactions. In the 2024/25 financial year, the number of active firms dropped by 3.9%, and by 8.3% compared to two years earlier. This follows a period of continued sector consolidation and increased merger and acquisition activity throughout 2024.
As a result, average caseloads per firm have increased. The average property law firm completed 267 transactions over the past financial year, a 7.8% rise compared to the previous year. Despite this growth, average caseloads remain 15.1% below their peak during the market boom following the pandemic.
The first quarter of 2025 offered limited encouragement. Although there was a 1.1% increase in transaction volumes compared to Q1 2024, this early uptick, driven in part by activity ahead of a Stamp Duty deadline, was undermined by weaker performance in April. Transactions fell nearly 5% year on year that month, contributing to an overall -0.4% drop for the first four months of 2025.
Meanwhile, the number of active property law firms continued to decline, falling by 6.7% in Q1 2025 compared to the same period last year. At the same time, the average caseload rose to 69, marking an 8.4% increase year on year.
Over the longer term, market patterns reveal how the legal profession has adapted. Compared to Q1 2015, property transaction volumes in Q1 2025 are just 5.2% higher, but the number of active firms has fallen by 13.2%. As a result, the average caseload per firm has climbed by 21.2% over the decade.
Andrew Loyd, managing director at Search Acumen, commented: “It’s been almost a year since the current Government came into power, but we are yet to feel the impact of its ambitions for the UK’s property sector.
“We know there’s strong demand and a healthy appetite for investment across the real estate ecosystem, opening up exciting opportunities. In commercial property, we’ve started to see how strong rental growth and a stabilisation in yields finally means offices are an attractive option, ready to catch up with better-performing sectors in retail and industrial. We are also seeing a lot of interest around large, social housing portfolios, which will only continue to increase following the Government’s recent £39bn investment pledge.”
Despite this optimism, he highlighted that transaction activity remains below expectations.
“But for all this buzz, the reality is that transactions are still not where the industry would like them to be, and these figures are concerning,” Loyd said. “The real estate sector is at a critical juncture. With macroeconomic turmoil looming overseas, there is a danger that a drop in market confidence could derail growth in the property sector.”
Loyd also noted that the coming months will be pivotal for legal firms. “In the face of these challenges, the remainder of the year will be pivotal. The Spending Review sent some strong, positive signals, opening the doors to more sustained growth in transaction volumes,” he explained.
“Real estate lawyers will be under pressure to keep up the pace as they navigate a rapidly evolving landscape driven by considerable market consolidation. Many increasingly find themselves in growing, centralised practices with rising levels of casework and a need to make sure they are investing in the right tools to deliver the results they’re aiming for. Under these conditions, maximising efficiencies and standardising processes across teams is essential to maintaining speed and quality.
“Property transactions in the past were routinely held back or slowed down by the complexity and archaic nature of processing multi-site portfolios, but this is no longer the case for legal teams that have begun to adopt new digital tools, which can cut down document reading time by 80% in some cases.
“Law firms hoping to maintain the speed and quality of their work for clients can no longer afford to be behind on these developments.”
