Most of us will make fewer decisions bigger than buying or selling a home, so it is striking how many people finish the experience swearing never to do it again.
A new study hits home on that point. The Open Property Data Association (OPDA), the UK’s not-for-profit body for open property data standards, commissioned a survey of 5,001 people who had bought or sold a home in the past five years.
Two-thirds said the process was so difficult it has put them off moving again. Among 35 to 44-year-olds, the people most likely to be trading up for a growing family, that figure rises to nearly three in four. One in five say they have been significantly deterred from ever moving again.
This is not a story about fussy buyers and sellers with cold feet. It’s a story about a system in need of fundamental change.
The frustration starts to build wherever the data stops flowing. More than half of respondents (58%) had a transaction collapse after an offer was accepted. When that happens, buyers and sellers lose three months on average. Nearly two-thirds were asked to provide the same information two or three times. Almost one in five were asked four or five times. One in ten transactions dragged on beyond six months. Over-55s expected a move to take around 85 days; the reality was closer to 135.
I could go on.
But none of this is because the technology is missing. Among many other industries, property has in recent years been at the forefront of a raft of technological developments.
Property portals, inspection software, Automated Valuation Models (AVM), digital identity and anti-money-laundering (AML) verification, and building intelligence have all found a firm foothold in the built environment. Property lending was also an early adopter of Open Banking, using it for instant income and affordability verification over paper payslips.
Property has clearly produced real innovation, but what it has historically failed at is letting those innovations talk to each other. Sure, it happens in isolated cases, but homebuying is not a monolith, so it simply never built the shared plumbing.
So, the reality right now is that each party, whether that’s estate agents, lenders, conveyancers, or surveyors, hold their own data. Sometimes it’s in different formats, or on different systems. Trust in another’s version of the data is hard to come by. What follows is a process that asks and checks at every step, over and over again until the process finally completes.
This is why the idea of a data trust framework matters, and why it deserves attention from anyone who cares about technology serving people.
The principle is simple, really. Verify information once, then let it be securely reused by everyone who needs it, with the consumer deciding what gets shared. A digital property pack assembled up front. A single digital identity check instead of many. Verified data that travels with the sale.
Upfront, shareable information can help to remove or greatly reduce the painful, anxiety-inducing waits that punctuate the homebuying process.
The consumer benefits can stack up quickly, with the most obvious being speed. Upfront, shareable information can help to remove or greatly reduce the painful, anxiety-inducing waits that punctuate the homebuying process.
This in turn should lead to fewer collapses, because when everyone works from the same verified facts, fewer deals fall apart. According to the OPDA, fall-throughs could cost the UK economy almost £2 billion every year.
There should also be less repetition. Enter your details once, not three, four or five times. Then there is the matter of cost and stress. Fewer failed transactions mean less wasted money and less of the emotional toll the report documents. Of those who endured a fall-through, 43% reported emotional stress and 36% a financial loss.
Consumers can feel the direction of travel, that’s why support for digital property packs has risen to 86% in this year’s report, and confidence in sharing information digitally has jumped from 76% to 87% year on year. Asked what they most want from a modern process, people pointed to speed, ease of use and real-time updates.
Unfortunately, there is always a catch. The benefits can only be realised if the data standards are shared. If every firm builds its own incompatible version, the silos start all over again. Interoperability, or the work of agreeing that one system can safely read another’s data, needs a neutral orchestrator with no commercial stake in owning the pipelines.
That is the role OPDA is working towards. A not-for-profit, setting common standards and an accreditation mark, while the government does its part.
The economic prize is real. A recent government report claimed that smart data can generate up to £14.1 billion in net social value, adding £2.06 billion a year to GDP by 2043. Homebuying has been identified as a top priority for smart data implementation.
For many, though, the human prize is more compelling. One of life’s most stressful transactions, made calmer and quicker.
For a sector that resisted change for decades, before a wave of innovation and the proptech revolution, the appetite is finally here. The technology is proven elsewhere, just look at Open Banking.
What remains is the patient, shared work of standards, governance, and trust. It rarely makes headlines, but quietly fixing homebuying may be one of the more meaningful tech for good projects this country has going on, and the positive social impact could be huge.
