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

Every time a conveyancer sends an application to HM Land Registry — to register your purchase, your mortgage, or a change of ownership — HMLR checks it. If something's wrong (a missing signature, the wrong form, the fee off by a fiver), they send it back with a query attached. That query is called a Request for Information, or RFI. Your application sits on the pile until the conveyancer fixes it. Every RFI costs you a few days at minimum.

Before 2025, HMLR just published the share of applications that hit at least one error. From 2025 onwards, they count total RFI items per 100 applications, which is more useful: one badly-prepared file can attract three or four separate queries, and the new way of counting picks that up.

What counts as “avoidable”?

Not every requisition is the conveyancer's fault. HMLR splits them into avoidable and unavoidable. Avoidable means a working conveyancer should have caught it before sending the file off: the fee was wrong, the form was out of date, they forgot to attach the deed, the property description didn't match. Unavoidable covers things nobody could reasonably have predicted from the paperwork.

The published dataset only counts the avoidable ones. That's why it actually tells you something about a firm's quality of work, rather than just how busy they are.

So what's a normal rate?

The industry-wide average in the most recent dataset (Q4 2025) is 18.6 RFI items per 100 applications. So if a firm submits 100 files, roughly 19 of those will get a query back. A firm well under that is sending in cleaner work. A firm well over is holding their clients up more often than the average.

You can occasionally see rates above 100. That's not impossible — it means a typical application from that firm attracts more than one error query, on average. It's rare but it happens.

Why some firm pages don't show a rate

HMLR only publishes rates for firms that submitted at least 10 applications in the period. Below that, the maths gets unreliable: one mistake on three applications would give you a rate of 33%, which is just noise, not a pattern. If a firm on Cleerd doesn't have a published rate, it's because they came in under the threshold for the latest period.

How we use this on Cleerd

The avoidable requisition rate is our headline number for every firm. We pull it straight from HMLR's dataset and show it exactly as published, with the national average alongside for context. We don't weight it, adjust it, or wrap it up in a single “score” with other things. Before we publish any firm's page, we match them to the SRA or CLC register so we know we're showing the right firm's numbers — the full process is on our methodology page.