Dye & Durham’s depth of expertise covers many aspects of conveyancing, enabling the organisation to support conveyancers with both data and insight. We spoke to Tim Champney Commercial Product Director to find out more about his background and how the company works with legal firms.
1. Tell us about your background.
I’ve always been interested in the environment. I love the outdoors, wildlife and spending time in the countryside. These interests have led to a varied career, with environmental issues at the centre.
I have experience in site investigation and contamination assessment from the perspective of a multitude of stakeholders, including developers, regulators and landowners. I’ve also spent time in the insurance market, underwriting environmental risks usually associated with large, complex or particularly polluted sites.
When I was Managing Director of Future Climate Info (FCI), I worked with the team to develop new and exciting products for the conveyancing market before the business was acquired by Dye & Durham in 2021.
I have a degree in geography and a post-grad in environmental engineering. I’m a Chartered Water and Environmental Manager, an Environmental Auditor and an Associate Member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).
2. As a Chartered Environmental professional, what insight do you bring to the team for the benefit of legal firms and their clients?
I like to think I bring some practical, real-world knowledge on the interrelationships between the built environment and the natural environment. I understand the broad methods and means of finding solutions to risk, and I understand the various priorities that affect different types of customers depending on their circumstances. As a chartered professional, I’m obligated to put customer’s best interests at the forefront of what we do here at Dye & Durham, and this is a mindset I have always strived to embed within the team. We have a fantastic team at Dye and Durham, with many experts qualified in their fields, all of whom are driven to solve problems. We’ve managed to build a culture of delivering insight, not just data, which means legal firms and their clients can rely on us to provide practical advice and solutions that really work for them.
3. Describe your journey at Dye & Durham and your focus up until now.
When FCI was acquired in May 2021, we worked closely with our new sister companies to build a consolidated operating model that enabled us to share knowledge and expertise on all the risks affecting a property purchase.
Now as Commercial Product Director, I am focused on evolving the Dye & Durham product offering here in the UK. In particular, we’re working hard to deliver new and innovative ways for our customers to access or consume critical information, ultimately to make their role more efficient and to enable them to provide even more insightful advice to their customers.
One such area is the emerging appreciation of future risks associated with climate change. This will only become more important as the physical and transitional issues become more pronounced. For example, our in-house data models indicate that an additional 1.9 million properties in Great Britain could be exposed to an elevated risk of subsidence damage because of climate change by 2080. This understanding drove us to make available the first Climate Change reporting tool in the conveyancing space back in the spring of 2022. We felt we could bring significant value to our customers, given that we are already connecting the dots in the background, supplying that same insight to the lending and insurance sector. Doing so allows us to offer a consistent view across the many stakeholders involved in a transaction.
There’s much more to do in this area, but I’m excited about how far we’ve already come in growing awareness and accessibility to understand emerging climate hazards.
4. Why are physical risks associated with property purchases so important for lawyers to understand?
Physical risks can have a significant impact on the value, insurability and mortgageability of a property. They can also impact the occupier’s quiet enjoyment of a property, and even disrupt plans to repurpose or redevelop. So, it’s pretty critical that prospective buyers understand what they are taking on. In the home-buying process, the lawyer or conveyancer is an indispensable, central point of trust for the purchaser, someone who understands when to seek further advice, and how.
Because of the multi-dimensional elements of physical risk, it is essential for lawyers to partner with a consultative, supportive firm like Dye & Durham, which can give them the means to report appropriately on physical risks to fully inform the client and fulfil their duty of care.
5. Why is Dye & Durham the best option to support legal firms in relation to reporting on physical risks?
Dye & Durham is a global business, operating over three continents in Canada, Australia, the UK and Ireland. The scale of our operation means that we are in a fantastic position to gain insights from other jurisdictions and apply them locally for the benefit of all our customers.
We also follow a guiding principle: “Will it help someone buy that property faster, more efficiently, and with a better ultimate outcome?” By maintaining a solutions-focused, efficiency-driven mindset, we give law firms the best footing to serve their clients with efficiency, certainty and minimal risk.
This article was submitted to be published by Dye & Durham as part of their advertising agreement with Today’s Conveyancer. The views expressed in this article are those of the submitter and not those of Today’s Conveyancer.
