This was always going to be a tricky interview. I’ve known Kevin Tunnicliffe, chief executive officer of Sort Group, which includes Sort Refer, for over 20 years. But for the last decade my other half has been in some way a direct competitor. Talk about awkward.
But despite our perceived ‘competitor connections’ Tunnicliffe is more than at ease, revealing both extraordinary insights, not only highlighting his passion for conveyancing and mortgages but also homebuying and also how to change it.
We’re sat in some early Spring sunshine outside the German Gymnasium in London’s Kings Cross – home to the first London Olympic games gymnasium – but now ‘a temple to German cuisine with the buzzing atmosphere of a traditional Grand Café’.
Or so the website says. But we’re also subject to the obligatory Spring renovations, hammering and banging on the roadside and quickly change table further away from the clatter.
Drinks delivered and we’re down to business.
“Britain’s home-moving system will not be fixed by technology alone,” he says.
His answer is simpler: fewer files, higher fees, better-paid staff and a complete rethink of how the industry works together.
Wow. This isn’t someone trying to flatter his industry. He’s trying to shake it awake.
PRESSURE POINTS
Kevin Tunnicliffe is CEO of Sort Group, which includes SortRefer, the Derby-based conveyancing panel management business that he set up after the 2008 financial crisis.
And Tunnicliffe is more than qualified, having spent years in and around the housing market, first as a mortgage broker and then as the head of a company sitting at one of the most pressurised points in any property transaction: the legal process.
After almost two decades of watching delays, frayed tempers and collapsing deals, he has reached a conclusion that is both unfashionable and blunt.
“If Britain wants a better conveyancing system, it will have to pay for it.”
If Britain wants a better conveyancing system, it will have to pay for it.
For Tunnicliffe, the central problem is not hard to identify. It is not a shortage of apps, dashboards or digital fixes. It is not even, primarily, a lack of ambition. It is that too much of the sector has spent too long treating conveyancing as a commodity, forcing fees down and workloads up, then wondering why service levels disappoint.
“The race to the bottom” is the phrase he returns to repeatedly. In his telling, it has warped the economics of the industry for years. Consumers, brokers and estate agents want speed, certainty and communication AND they want to receive higher referral fees for what in many cases is simply passing over an instruction.
Yet many law firms are still expected to deliver all the above whilst being paid what he regards as unsustainably low fees for arguably the most expensive overhead in the process.
TWO SIDES OF THE COIN
Tunnicliffe knows the market from both sides. He started out as a mortgage broker in the early 1990’s and continued advising until about 2015, even after SortRefer had been established.
That decision, he says, was partly practical: it gave the business the cashflow it needed in its formative years. “We didn’t take a salary for three or four years,” he recalls. “We just kept pumping it back in.”
The origins of SortRefer lie in the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, when broking became tougher and Tunnicliffe grew increasingly frustrated with the conveyancing platforms available at the time.
They didn’t give brokers the visibility they needed. Instructions went in, and then, he says, there was often silence until the case completed. The updates, when they came, arrived in a flurry and too late to be useful.
That mattered for a practical reason as much as a customer-service one. Once a client exchanges contracts, a legal commitment has been made and brokers need to know so they can ensure associated protection arrangements, such as life cover, are in place. Without live progress updates, that process became harder to manage.
INFORMATION GAP
SortRefer’s model was built around solving that information gap. Rather than simply assembling a panel of law firms.
Tunnicliffe wanted firms integrated into the company’s system so that updates on their own case management software would flow automatically into SortRefer’s platform. The ambition was to keep introducers informed in real time, rather than leave them guessing.
Nearly 20 years on, he believes the sector still has not fixed the deeper structural issue.
“There’s more technology around now than there was back then,” he says. “But there’s far more work for conveyancers to do than there was even six years ago.”
Plenty of industries talk about technology as if it were a cure-all. Tunnicliffe is more sceptical. Artificial intelligence, he believes, will improve efficiency. It should help reduce errors, pick up issues earlier in the process and cut back on the kind of administrative friction that generates yet more delay.
Land Registry requisitions, for example, could be reduced if systems spot problems sooner. Titles can be reviewed earlier. Information and queries can be raised faster.
But he doesn’t think AI, at least not yet, replaces the human judgement required in conveyancing. The process remains messy, emotional and fact specific. Buying or selling a home is not a sterile data exercise. It is bound up with anxiety, timing, money and personal circumstance.
ROBO-ADVICE
He draws a comparison with the hype that once surrounded robo-advice in mortgages. That revolution, he suggests, never quite arrived in the form many predicted. Technology has certainly taken over more of the administrative burden, but advice itself remains stubbornly human. Conveyancing, he believes, will prove similar and rightfully so.
For now, he argues, the more urgent task is cultural rather than technical.
He bristles at the phrase “conveyancing factory”, seeing it as a lazy insult often aimed at high-volume operators. In his view, the bigger firms are not inherently the problem. In some respects, they may be part of the solution because they are often the ones investing in training and building the next generation of conveyancers. Small firms, he suggests, cannot always do that at the same scale.
What matters is not simply size, but workload. “Less is more” is the phrase he uses. If a conveyancer has fewer files, more time, and clearer control over the pipeline, cases move faster, communication improves and output becomes more predictable. In that world, profitability can rise even if raw volume falls.
SIMPLE MATH
Before the pandemic, a case might complete in roughly 12 weeks. After Covid, timelines stretched, in some cases towards 24 weeks.
If firms respond merely by cramming in more files to compensate for the slower completion cycle, pressure intensifies, service worsens and the system seizes up further. Tunnicliffe’s answer is the reverse: lower caseloads, quicker throughput, better service, higher fees.
It is a deeply unfashionable argument in a market trained to price cheapness. Yet he insists it is the only serious route out of the current bind. Good conveyancing, he says, cannot be delivered on bargain-basement terms.
That message also shapes how he wants SortRefer to operate. He says the company has resisted requests from panel firms wanting to cut prices to win more work. That, to him, only entrenches the problem.
If fees improve, he argues, the gains should not simply disappear into the margin. Staff must be paid more too and investment must be made in training and development as well as new technologies.
UNDERPAID AND UNDERVALUED
This is another of his recurring themes: conveyancing is underpaid relative to the responsibility it carries.
Compared with other legal disciplines, the rewards are modest and the daily stress can be punishing.
Clients are emotional. Introducers are impatient. The transaction itself is one of the biggest financial decisions most people will ever make. Yet many of the people holding the process together, he suggests, are not remunerated in a way that reflects that.
He thinks the industry is still living with the after-effects of Covid as well as the damage done in 2008.
Experienced people left the sector and have not been fully replaced. Those coming through are younger but qualification alone does not make a strong conveyancer any more than passing a driving test makes someone a seasoned driver. Competence, he says, comes with years of repetition, judgement and exposure.
That makes training crucial and helps explain why Tunnicliffe does not dismiss larger firms simply for being large.
The real challenge, in his view, is whether the system gives those firms enough space to train people properly. If recruits are thrown into overloaded workflows too quickly, the cycle of poor service simply renews itself.
BIGGER PICTURE
SortRefer itself now sits inside a wider group structure that includes Sort Legal, its own law firm. That expansion, Tunnicliffe says, was driven in part by capacity constraints as the panel management side grew.
Owning a law firm has also given the Group a different perspective. It means feeling the operational pain directly rather than only observing it from the outside.
He also sees a future in which the various participants in the property transaction stop treating one another as adversaries.
Too often, he says, the conveyancer has become the “whipping boy” for the wider sector, blamed by brokers, agents and others whenever deals stall.
His preferred model is more collaborative: estate agent, broker and conveyancer working with a shared mindset of getting the client to completion quickly and cleanly.
PROPERTY HUBS
That belief is feeding into plans for physical “property hubs” in places where the Group has a presence, such as Derby, Cardiff and South Shields, with Newcastle also part of the picture.
The concept is straightforward: combine legal, agency and mortgage capability more closely so that communication improves and responsibility is shared rather than endlessly deflected.
For Tunnicliffe, the business opportunity lies as much in technology as in operations.
SortRefer already employs a sizeable development team and he sees Sort Legal as a useful testing ground.
If the group can identify pain points within its own legal operation, use technology or AI to improve them and prove that the changes work, those tools could potentially be deployed more widely across the market.
That is where he sees growth over the next five years: not just as a panel manager but as a technology player too.
BEYOND THE HORIZON
Nearing 60, Tunnicliffe says he is not ready to retire. He now has a managing director taking more of the day-to-day load which has freed him to spend more time thinking about the wider industry.
That appears to suit him. He is, by his own admission, opinionated, but also increasingly determined to act as a spokesman for a sector he thinks still undervalues itself.
What he wants, ultimately, is not complicated. He wants a conveyancing industry where staff are properly paid, workloads are manageable, communication is vastly better and consumers, brokers and agents have more confidence in the process. He believes good service is achievable and that clients do recognise it when they see it.
He believes that referral fees should be capped, so that the ‘tail cannot wag the dog’ and he is passionate about getting a quoting framework in place that is fully transparent and actually gives the client a chance of understanding it.
The question is whether the market is willing to abandon its addiction to low fees long enough to build something better.
Tunnicliffe has no doubt about the answer it should give. Pay a quality fee, he says, and you can expect a quality service.
Pay too little, and you get exactly what you paid for.
