AI: What does it mean for conveyancing? | Conveyo

By putting those at the cutting edge of innovation in the artificial intelligence (AI) arena under the microscope, a clearer view of how AI might influence conveyancing both now and in years to come will emerge. Here, we look at Conveyo.

Who are Conveyo?

Conveyo stands for the new way of home buying and selling! Conveyo prepares properties to be legally ready before listing, making home sales more certain and efficient.

Conveyo was founded in 2022 by magic circle property lawyer Dr Konrad Rotthege and data scientist Andrea Monti Solza with the objective to help home movers sell without hassle and buy with confidence. Today, Conveyo is supported by HM Land Registry’s Geovation accelerator and reputable investors, such as global venture capital firm Antler.

Conveyo ensures frictionless property transactions by collecting all required data early in the process and sharing it with all stakeholders through its digital conveyancing platform. For customers, Conveyo offers a tailored concierge service around their transaction. Often, home sales are not easily accessible to individuals, leaving them unsure what to do and who to trust. Conveyo steps in as their trusted partner guiding sellers & buyers towards a seamless transaction.

Through its network, Conveyo helps customers to find the best-fit estate agent and solicitors for their transaction. Beyond that matchmaking, Conveyo coordinates the entire transaction, handles the legal workstream and provides automated communications between all parties, making sure everyone is on the same page without the need for update calls.

With Conveyo, everybody wins: sellers and buyers transact without hassle and with more confidence while solicitors save time and increase their profitability.

What are the conveyancing-related challenges that Conveyo has set out to tackle?

Conveyo is on a mission to make home buying and selling easier, faster, and more certain.

To achieve this, changes to the conveyancing process are evidently necessary. While effective in its core, the current process has been plagued by a lack of coordination, time-consuming administrative tasks, and a reliance on manual procedures.

Technology has enabled us to solve some of the current issues. Some firms already embrace technology in some form while others still operate manually or on paper.

However, the reality is that these manual workflows consume valuable time and erode hourly rates, potentially comprising the competitive edge of these firms. This is exactly where Conveyo steps in, offering a gateway for all firms to seamlessly leverage technology at an accessible price point, allowing conveyancers to unlock invaluable time efficiencies.

To give you an example: Conveyo collects all client and property information – without any doing of the solicitor. Through our self-service ID & AML checks, digital property questionnaires, and digital client care packages, solicitors can significantly reduce administrative burdens and client touchpoints during the onboarding process. Conveyo channels communications between all stakeholders to meet today’s expectation for immediate information and constant updates. This reduces margins for errors and misunderstanding while freeing up solicitors time to focus on actually moving transactions forward.

And our clients and partners are happy with the results: a transaction has recently been able to get to exchange within 4 weeks from sale agreed.

How is Conveyo using AI to overcome those challenges?

Not just since the introduction of ChatGPT, “AI” is everywhere and the expectations are high. I think it is important to understand what we mean by AI and what it can do for the conveyancing process.

For now, there are a number of steps in the conveyancing process that need expert solicitors’ attention like complex title issues. However, there are also a number of tasks that can be automated: Conveyo’s process of verifying consistency between the title data, EPC and ID verification data for example, is fully automated. Algorithms also help us to spot title issues or decide on the scope of searches.

Another example of the use of AI is Conveyo’s smart process tracker. An intelligent algorithm follows the transaction tasks and informs all parties once a task is completed. This eliminates the need for chasers and updates that so often seem to be in the way of focusing on moving a transaction forward.

Long-term, I think AI will be able to do much more for the conveyancing process: a ChatGPT-like system, trained by and for conveyancers, will be able to process larger amounts of data and intelligently respond to queries. However, as we all know from ChatGPT, it is essential to have humans verify any outputs.

How will use of AI in this case benefit conveyancers in practice?

Over the next decade, we will see growing capabilities of AI tools. We envision these tools to help conveyancers with knowledge management, process management, and decision making. This should make our lives easier and our work more efficient, much like switching from letter to email, to give a simplified example. While I imagine AI tools to be a helpful “co-pilot” for certain areas of the conveyancing process, I would not expect them to replace human conveyancers. It remains to be seen if customers would be prepared to complete a purchase of the magnitude of a property without a qualified conveyancer protecting their interests.

What challenges and risks occur through use of AI in this case, and how are Conveyo managing or overcoming this?

While AI is working well in certain areas, it is still early days in others. As humans, we need to carefully select how and when to deploy AI and if we can trust it or not. This is why, today, Conveyo uses AI for the gathering, processing and verification of certain data points, but not for other areas.

Other concerns in connection with AI rank around data protection, insurance (are mistakes made by AI an “insured event” under your PI policy?), but also unconscious biases. Since AI is trained by humans, its output is subject to unconscious biases, a recent study shows.

Learn more here: www.conveyo.io