What is an avoidable requisition — and why does it matter?

When a conveyancer submits an application to HM Land Registry — to register a purchase, lodge a mortgage, or transfer ownership — the registry checks it for errors. If something is wrong (a missing signature, an incorrect fee, the wrong form), they raise what is called a request for information (RFI). The conveyancer must correct it before the application proceeds. Every RFI causes delay.

Until 2025, HMLR published an “avoidable requisition rate” — the proportion of applications that triggered at least one error query. The 2025 dataset shifted to counting total RFI items raised per 100 applications, which gives a more granular picture because a single application can attract multiple separate queries.

What counts as an avoidable error?

HMLR distinguishes between avoidable and unavoidable requisitions. Avoidable errors are those the conveyancer could have caught before submission: wrong fee, wrong form version, missing document that was clearly required, incorrect description of the title. They exclude unavoidable requests — situations where HMLR requires additional information that could not have been anticipated from the application documents alone.

The published dataset only includes avoidable errors, which is why it is a meaningful proxy for application quality rather than just volume.

What the national average means

The volume-weighted national average in the most recent HMLR dataset (Q4 2025) is 18.6 RFI items per 100 applications. This means that for every 100 applications submitted across the industry, approximately 19 error queries are raised. A firm with a rate significantly below that is submitting cleaner applications. A firm significantly above it is generating more delays for its clients.

The rate can exceed 100 for firms with very poor submission quality — one application attracting five separate queries would contribute 5 to the count. This is uncommon but possible.

Why HMLR only publishes firms above a threshold

HMLR only includes firms that submitted at least 10 applications in the period. Below that threshold the sample is too small to be statistically meaningful — a single error on 3 applications would produce a rate of 33%, which could easily be noise rather than a pattern. If a firm's page on this site does not show a requisition rate, it is because they fell below that threshold in the most recent period.

How Cleerd uses this data

The avoidable requisition rate is our headline metric. We source it directly from HMLR's published dataset and display it exactly as published — we do not adjust, weight, or interpret the figures beyond contextualising them against the national average. We match each HMLR firm to the SRA or CLC register to confirm identity before publishing — see our methodology page for the full matching protocol.