The Open Property Data Association (OPDA) is urging property professionals to respond to the government’s home buying consultation, which the organisation says is “a unique opportunity for transformational change”.
OPDA – whose members include NatWest Group, HSBC, Nationwide and Lloyds Banking Group – campaigns to improve the home buying and selling process, including safe and secure sharing of trusted open property data and upfront information.
“It currently takes an average of 22 weeks for customers to reach completion on their home purchase,” OPDA said, citing Rightmove. “By contrast, those using OPDA’s data standards for digital property packs have seen time reduced from mortgage offer and purchase accepted to exchange within 15 days.”
OPDA chair Maria Harris said it was vital that everyone involved in the home moving process – from consumers to conveyancers, intermediaries to lenders – has their say on the government’s proposals.
“Buying a home shouldn’t take months of uncertainty and stress,” she said.
“But because of outdated processes, duplication and breakdowns in communication, the house moving process now takes twice as long as it did 20 years ago.
“We believe open data and technology standards are essential for transforming the housing market and delivering proven economic benefits, and that’s why we’re working with the industry to campaign for change.
“We have a unique opportunity to deliver the type of transformational change that doesn’t come along very often – let’s make sure we land this one by sharing our views.”
The consultation closes on 29 December.
3 responses
Property lawyers face a clear choice. We can allow ourselves to be marginalised by groups intent on stripping integrity from home buying and often heavily sponsored by huge IT businesses, as exposed in Panorama. We can sit back and risk the mistakes of Horizon being repeated in our own law sector. Or we can fight—fight to ensure reforms are led by real property lawyers, not by a lawtech lobby that wants the rewards of digitalisation but none of the accountability.
Sorry but most property lawyers do not agree with OPDA’s view of conveyancing reforms.
I believe that most conveyancers believe that open data and the sharing of information as envisaged by OPDA will make little difference
I believe the real barriers to a faster conveyancing process aren’t even being considered
I believe that 22 weeks isn’t an average but is an aberration created by business models force fed transactions by estate agents and brokers for a fee. These business models focus on technology led processing of transactions and eg the use of Standard Enquiries and fail to apply legally enhanced thinking to the specifics of the transaction
I believe chains are problematic and UK Finance has no real desire to provide alternative funding arrangements.
I believe technology providers are interested ultimately in their own profits and in trying to secure for themselves more of the share of the property transaction tree’s fruit.
More qualified and properly trained conveyancers and a much more competitive market free from the grip of vested interests who have created fee sharing conglomerates designed to squeeze as much out of consumers as possible without any care at all to the service levels some consumers must endure.
Plenty of law firms can currently easily beat 22 weeks without the purported benefits of digitisation.
The Emperor is naked.
Merry Christmas!!
I wish the OPDA et al would stop gas lighting and Today’s Conveyancer you are complicit in publishing such nonsense. Maria Harris is not even a conveyancer, and those conveyancers ‘guiding’ the OPDA are in it for their own financial gain (i.e. factory models). Digitisation does not even begin to address the underlying legal problems which government are to cowardly to deal with.
None of this is going to make a difference to time scales and oh wait, even Amazon Prime has stopped delivering next day!
Conveyancers you must now stand up and stop being trodden all over by people “who have the right contacts”. Doing nothing is also an injustice.