Ed Molyneux has been arguing that AI in property has a data problem, not a capability problem. Now that CFIT’s Open Property Coalition Roadmap 2026 is published, he reminds us where to ‘skate’ – and offers two specific actions every practice should take this quarter.
Canadian ice-hockey legend Wayne Gretzky’s most quoted line is: “You skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” The Open Property Coalition’s Roadmap 2026, published this week by CFIT, deserves a reading through that lens.
The roadmap itself is encouraging: verified portable data; a digital property ID; interoperable standards stretching across estate agents, lenders, conveyancers and buyers. £14.1 billion of estimated public value over 15 years.
The roadmap acknowledges the Property Data Trust Framework – the open standard I originally led the creation of in 2019 – as “a credible standard for upfront property data” and lists Moverly among its pioneers. Foundations laid right.
But two AI shifts have moved the puck since this work was scoped, and they shorten every relevant timeline.
Shift one: Implementation cost has collapsed
Software engineering is now fully agent-powered, at least inside nimble organisations. The cost of implementing a new standard, mapping legacy data into it, and transforming the unstructured documents that flood every property transaction – scanned building regulations certificates, planning consents, lease packs from the 1960s – has fallen by an order of magnitude in 12 months.
A year of integration work is now weeks. Bespoke document extraction has become a commodity, replaced by structured-extraction agents that work straight from PDFs. We see this in our own engineering: a six-person team can now ship infrastructure that would have needed 60 in 2022.
This matters for the roadmap because the cost-benefit arithmetic that determines how long adoption takes has changed. If implementation is a fraction of what it was, the period in which industry can credibly adopt open standards is no longer a multi-year programme.
Shift two: The work itself is going agentic
Conveyancing is going where software has already gone. The roughly 70% of a transaction that sits below what I have called the judgment line – the data gathering, the cross-referencing, the chasing, the routine checks against lender criteria and protocol forms – will be fully agentic within 12-18 months for firms that want it to be.
Not partly agentic, not assisted – fully. The remaining 30% – the genuine professional judgment around risk, advice and client trust – becomes the entire job.
I do not say this to alarm anyone – the capacity case is overwhelming. There are now around 10,700 practising conveyancing solicitors in England and Wales, down 13% in two years, while transaction volumes are recovering. Of fee-earner time, 41% is reportedly spent chasing. The arithmetic only works if AI handles the intelligence work and qualified people concentrate on judgment.
Where the puck is actually going
These two shifts mean a few specific things for the OPC roadmap.
Standards have to be readable by agents from day one, not retrofitted later. Verifiable credentials and lifecycle trust events need to sit in the protocol, not in a phase-two upgrade. And reference implementations have to be in production now, on real transactions, so the standard is shaped by what actually works rather than what reads well in a committee.
That is what good already looks like in places. Last month, Lloyds Banking Group, Connells Group and LMS announced their fully digital home buying service for England and Wales, with Moverly as the property intelligence partner.
Sellers become digital sale ready before a buyer is found. Property facts, ID, material information and supporting documents are captured once, verified at source, and made available across the chain. It is the first time the country’s biggest mortgage lender, one of its biggest estate agency groups and its biggest panel manager have wired themselves together around a shared, open data layer.
It is live now.
What to do this quarter
If you are running a practice, the practical questions to put on your desk this quarter are smaller than they sound.
First, look at where data flows in and out of your firm and ask whether each touchpoint is readable by an agent. Anything that arrives as an email body, a scanned PDF, or an answer in a free-text comment box is friction that will be eaten by agents in the next eighteen months. Anywhere your data is already structured, you are ahead.
Second, pick one workflow this year that you would happily run with agent assistance. Enquiry drafting. Initial document triage. Building regs verification. Lender Part 1 pre-screening. Get one win on the board so the firm has a baseline to learn from. It does not have to be the most ambitious thing on your list. It just has to be real.
The roadmap is the right destination. We just need to skate faster than it has scheduled.
About the author
Ed Molyneux is co-founder and CTO of Moverly, the property intelligence platform working with LMS and Connells Group to bring structured, verified data to property transactions. He is the architect of the Property Data Trust Framework (PDTF), the open standard for machine-readable property data now being adopted across the industry. Ed writes about AI, property data infrastructure, and the future of conveyancing.
