CFIT convenes industry coalition to develop an Open Property Smart Data scheme

Buying a home in the UK is a major source of stress and frustration for home owners and buyers. Transactions on average take 22 weeks to complete, and 30% of deals fall through, costing the consumer £560 million alone.

Backed by the Smart Data team at the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), the Open Property Coalition convened by the CFIT will will build on existing research, industry pilots and stakeholder initiatives and explore how emerging technologies like Digital ID, tokenisation and trust frameworks could help reimagine the process in the future. Members of the coalition include a range of public and private-sector organisations including the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), HM Land Registry, the Open Property Data Association (OPDA), real estate companies, financial institutions, regulators, conveyancers and proptechs.

The OPDA estimates that less than one percent of the data required to buy a home is available in digital format, resulting in delays, duplication, errors and fraud that can easily occur every time information is shared between estate agents, mortgage brokers, lenders, surveyors and conveyancers.

To tackle these issues, the CFIT intends to develop a proof-of-concept and roadmap for a smart data scheme built on the the extension of Open Banking-style secure data-sharing across all areas of financial services. Leon Ifayemi, director of coalitions and research at CFIT says an Open Property Smart Data scheme would enable the same kind of secure and instantaneous sharing of the data necessary for the homebuying process between authorised participants, i.e. estate agents, mortgage brokers, lenders, surveyors and conveyancers.

“Many of us have personally experienced how buying a home in England or Wales can be slow, opaque, costly and aggravating,” he says. “Work is already underway from DBT, MHCLG, HM Land Registry and the OPDA to digitise elements of the process. But if we are going to successfully use technology to solve these pain points, we need policymakers, regulators and industry all to be pulling in the exact same direction. Tackling Open Property also means we can draw on our accumulated experience in areas like Open Finance and Digital ID.”