The property industry has taken so long to get digitised, that it now has an opportunity to learn from other sectors and to leapfrog whole generations of digital innovation. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to have been appreciated by those people in charge of large parts of the property sector’s data and system development. This is seriously hampering innovation in buying and selling.
As the recent reports on GenZ and the house buying process show, the future of digital conveyancing is not just a better version of the existing process. It needs a radical rethink.
There are two key principles to designing data services in the 21st Century (particularly for use by the general public):
- don’t build ‘web sites’ and start building ‘web services’ that can talk to other apps and systems
- design services which recognise that the general public will be using software and apps to access your data (and link to them).
This second point is crucial if we want homeowners to be active participants in a digitised property industry. Too many public service providers in the property market are still building commercially focussed digital systems on the assumption that they can just send a homeowner to a consumer website and give them a poor user experience.
This is true of HMLR, the OS, Geovation, the EPC register, Gas Safety Register and all Local Authorities. Unlike the Passport Office and the DVLA, no public sector organisation in property is building ‘web services’ which reflect the way consumers now use apps and software. Both the Passport Office and the DVLA are now reaping the benefits of their approach and innovating fast alongside private sector partners.
What is significantly different now in property and property data is that there are companies building software for the homeowner not for businesses – the Logbook companies and Upfront Information companies are at the centre of this. We are all working to the idea that using an app will be central to buying and managing our homes in the future.
However, from a technical and commercial point of view, many public data organisations and many commercial software companies (eg conveyancer CRMs) haven’t shifted their development strategies to reflect this. This is both a technical issue and a contractual one, particularly for digital conveyancing. Every consumer-facing proptech company building ‘upfront information’ apps is knowingly contravening HMLR T&Cs just to be able to get their services live. Even after doing that, we are still only given a subset of the data and functionality on offer to a conveyancer or mortgage company.
In buying and selling, this lack of focus on the homeowner is affecting how agents and conveyancers are developing their systems as well. Organisations are still assuming that homeowners will come to their websites and type in their information or request a PDF. But for upfront information, there are groups of companies (not just logbooks) that have built apps to help homeowners create a digital ‘Sellers Pack’. Our expectation was that our users would be able to share the contents digitally with estate agents and conveyancers. But there are almost no systems that have been adapted to receive information digitally from them.
The proptech world is having to build ‘Print As PDF’ buttons into our apps to reflect the reality of dealing with estate agents and conveyancers. The alternative is to just point our users at corporate websites and get them to re-type everything.
The needs of digitally literate homeowners has to be at the heart of digital conveyancing and, at the moment, they are not even at the table. The organisations driving the digital property revolution should ensure that all data is available to homeowners at all times, and directly into their software. It should also ensure that homeowners can upload data into systems directly from their software and not rely on others as in the past.
It is sometimes claimed that a key problem is ID. How does a public data system know when a homeowner has permission to access or upload data via an app? How can their system tell if an app that wants to connect is owned by the person that owns the home? For much of the data we are concerned with, this is an irrelevance because it is public data that is already being shared widely. We are merely asking for the right for homeowners to be able to access data digitally on equal terms as companies, without visiting a website, and preferably not having to pay to access their own data.
But for the growing amount of data that is held by public third parties and conveyancers on behalf of homeowners, and which fall under GDPR and privacy regulation, there is a need to validate their ID and their right to access a property’s data. The RLBA Register of Logbooks was built to solve this.
Currently, the only logbooks on the Register have been lodged by conveyancers who have done the personal and property ID checks. They are ‘verified’ logbooks and have been verified by the same people who update the Land Registry. The RLBA specify that these logbooks must offer a public/private key system which provides a mechanism for a logbook to be validated via the Register. Later in the year this system will increase the level of security available for data providers to ensure safe sharing of data.
This means that a homeowner connecting with a verified logbook can be identified in an online system, and be shown to have the right to access data. We are now adding data sources who have agreed to use the RLBA Register as ID in this way. All conveyancers should therefore be setting up logbooks for their clients and making sure they are listed on the RBLA Register to capitalise on this.
If the organisations holding data on our homes have built 21st Century systems, they can then share data with the homeowner with confidence. As we have seen with the Passport Office and the DVLA, this leads to a burst of innovation as private companies experiment with new services on behalf of the consumer.
This failure to properly provide the tools to help change the home moving process is a betrayal of all the small, innovative companies who have invested significant time and money in supporting the homeowner in the digital conveyancing revolution. Where is the urgency from those whose responsibility it is to support this innovation?
Innovators have precious little time to sit around while they wait for those responsible to provide the tools for real change.
The Residential Logbook Association is a trade association and self-regulatory body for companies providing digital logbooks for the residential property market
