Modern Law welcomes Sort Group into the Editorial Board family and spent 10 minutes getting to know CEO, Kev Tunnicliffe.

Hi Kev, Tell us about your role at your firm and your back story. What do you do, and what do you find most interesting about it?

My background was originally that of a mortgage broker when I entered the property industry back in 1991.  This helped to provide insight into the conveyancing sector, which led to the set-up of Sort Group and our Conveyancing proposition, SortRefer.

I’m the CEO and Founder of the Group. SortRefer started in 2008 and launched in April 2009.  Prior to launching, I was using other conveyancing options, but nobody was providing a full offering, with most providers simply offering a quote and instruct proposition.  There was no case tracking and no real-time updates, so we quickly set about building something that would provide more to our customer base.

To this day, I love the challenge of ‘always offering more’ and looking at ways that we can continue to make our proposition better.

Technology has come a long way in the last 16 years, and what really interests me now is how you make the latest technologies help all involved to provide the best possible customer service experience.

So, in summary, this company was born out of my personal experience of a disjointed system that I worked in for 15 years before this endeavour. We have tried to make Sort the tool that can do the full job. That’s been the goal all along.

What were your reasons for adding Sort Legal into the business?

We were growing at such a pace that by 2017, it made sense to guarantee some internal capacity with our law firm. The pace of the growth was the driving factor.

We knew what a broker wanted, as I’d walked in their shoes for a long time in my previous role. To this day, the majority of the business we get is from mortgage brokers, as they were the original target audience. However, everything that we have built over the last few years will also benefit estate agents and other conveyancing firms.

If you could go back to the start of your professional career, knowing what you know now, what advice would you give yourself?

The best piece of advice I would give my younger self would be to start using my voice, contacts and knowledge to make positive changes within the industry sooner. We’ve recently launched a Levelling up forum, inviting other key players in the industry to come together to discuss common challenges and solutions. Knowing what I know now, I do often wonder how much change we could have made if we had launched this sooner.

What are the challenges facing your business and industry right now?

The main challenges for Sort Group are two-fold twofold, competition and relevance.

I welcome competition: it keeps us on our toes and ensures that we continue to adapt as the industry changes.  We understand what our competition is and continually strive to offer a better all-round solution for our introducers and their clients.

It’s all about having your finger on the pulse of what everyone else is doing and how you can stand out against the rest.

The industry faces far bigger challenges, and I could write chapters on this.

At last, the property market is starting to move away from taking the cheapest conveyancing quote for their client.  The focus is becoming more about delivering modern technologies and quality customer service.

Completion times remain way too high, and for lots of reasons, the cost of conveyancing is not high enough.  Yet I am seeing many of my competitors trying to drive down the price, and it angers me.  When will conveyancing panel managers realise that consistent quality can’t be achieved while telling conveyancing firms they won’t get work due to high prices?

I cannot believe that they are still allowed to be instigators of the race to the bottom, and I wish that conveyancing firms dared to call them out on it.

The focus moving forwards must be on industry-wide higher pricing, backed up by a superior service and much faster turnaround times.

What would you say you are doing as a company to fix these issues in the industry?

In early 2024, we started a levelling-up forum consisting of conveyancing firms and other industry businesses coming together to discuss issues affecting the conveyancing industry and possible ways to start solving them.

Early results from some of the initial ideas are positive, and we will continue with these throughout 2025 when we hope to attract more attendees. The industry needs to be united in changing to move forward and fix problems in the property industry.

I’m delighted also to attend other events that are also looking at positive change, and now more than at any time over the last 5 years believe that we will start to see a positive change in the service levels offered, which will quickly lead to a change in how conveyancing is perceived across the property industry.

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