The Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology has published a roadmap for open property which it says sets out “a clear and credible pathway to transform the UK’s home buying process”.
The Open Property Roadmap was commissioned by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) to enable the digitalisation of the home buying and selling process, and signals the next phase of the UK’s Smart Data initiative, in an extension of the Open Banking and Open Finance schemes already in place.
The roadmap demonstrates how Smart Data principles, based on secure, consent-driven and interoperable data sharing, can transform the property transaction lifecycle by reducing delays, improving transparency, and strengthening trust.
The property roadmap is the first Smart Data coalition of its kind beyond financial services, with the coalition bringing together leaders from financial services, property, technology, government and regulators.
DBT commissioned CFIT to convene the coalition to develop a strategic roadmap for progressing towards an Open Property Smart Data Scheme, with home buying as the flagship use case.
Coalition participants include representatives from high street and specialist lenders, national and regional conveyancing firms, estate agency groups, property technology and data providers, search providers, surveyors, and public bodies including HM Land Registry (HMLR).
DBT leads the Smart Data programme, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) leads the home buying and selling reform programme, and HMLR holds core data on property ownership and title. Improving how trusted information flows across the property ecosystem supports both economic productivity and market transparency, CFIT explained in a statement announcing the initiative.
“This breadth of participation has been important in surfacing barriers and opportunities that span the full home buying and selling journey rather than reflecting any single part of the market,” CFIT said.
“The roadmap shows how we move from diagnosis of this economically significant challenge to delivery. It identifies the critical datasets, standards, governance frameworks, and commercial enablers required to create a fully digital, end-to-end home buying journey.”
CFIT CEO Anna Wallace said: “The UK’s home buying process is too slow, fragmented and stressful for consumers, with transactions taking months to complete and too many collapsing before completion. This roadmap shows there is a clear and credible pathway to progress through smarter, more secure and interoperable use of data.”
CFIT said the timing of the roadmap corresponds with a level of digital maturity across the property sector where coordinated change is now practical. Investment in digital systems by lenders, conveyancers, estate agents and data providers means the underlying infrastructure to support trusted data reuse is more widely in place than at any previous point.
“What has been missing is not digitalisation itself, but the coordination layer that connects these capabilities across the journey,” CFIT said. “Open Property is designed to provide that coordination.”
The “defining challenge” for progress is to reduce the time it takes to complete a transaction, CFIT explained.
“This is the central obstacle in a system that processes around 1.1 million transactions each year, worth nearly £380 billion, yet one that remains constrained by fragmented, paper-based processes. Today, less than 1% of the data required to buy a home is fully digitised, meaning information is repeatedly requested, verified, and re-shared across multiple parties – driving delay, duplication, and uncertainty at every stage.
“The consequences are significant. Approximately 530,000 transactions fail each year, costing consumers around £560 million in wasted fees and up to £950 million across the wider economy. By enabling the creation and sharing of verified digital property information upfront, the approach set out in the Roadmap directly targets these inefficiencies. This will help to prevent avoidable delays, reduce uncertainty, and accelerate decision-making across the transaction lifecycle.”
The roadmap sets out how CFIT envisages the move from diagnosis to delivery. Private sector funding has been secured to begin building a solution, initially focusing on the development of prototypes and proofs of concept, before live testing smart data solutions across the home buying journey and assessing the impact before advising on further policy recommendations to support adoption at scale.
Wallace added: “This milestone also demonstrates the power of CFIT’s coalition model to tackle systemic challenges that no single organisation can solve alone – bringing together industry, government and regulators to align around practical, deliverable solutions.”
Baroness Lloyd, the minister for the digital economy, said: “Today’s Open Property Roadmap marks an important step in delivering this government’s ambition for a world leading Smart Data economy. By bringing together industry, regulators and policymakers, CFIT has demonstrated how we can tackle complex, real-world challenges through collaboration and innovation.
“This work is not just about improving the home buying process – it is about building the foundations of a modern, data-enabled economy. The coalition model pioneered by CFIT provides practical insights that can inform the government’s implementation of the UK’s Smart Data Strategy, demonstrating how policy ambition can be tested and progressed in real‑world sectors.”
Work on phase two will commence in the summer.
7 responses
So on what planet has this roadmap been “unveiled” as stated in this article? Work on it commences in the summer – so nothing g has been “unveiled” at all, it down not in fact exist. You cannot unveil something that does not exist!
Actually, you can find the report here its pretty good!
https://cfit.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Open-Property-Coalition-4-Roadmap-2026-Final.pdf
Oddly, this is a different roadmap to the MHCLG one we are waiting for….
As lawyers, we are trained to look at the evidence, not the marketing. And when we look at the evidence of government‑backed IT schemes designed to “modernise” parts of our legal system, we see repeated failure, weak consultation, and a persistent refusal to listen to the professionals who carry the legal risk. Probate “digitalisation” is a case in point. So are the civil‑service‑designed “smart motorways”. The rhetoric is always confident; the outcomes rarely are.
It is fundamentally dishonest to talk about “modernisation” while the law‑tech sector continues to supply data on opaque terms of business that quietly shift the legal consequences of flawed or corrupted data onto consumers and their lawyers. No regulator should be endorsing a model where accountability is engineered out of the system.
And all of this is happening while the government keeps its head firmly in the sand about the cybercrime pandemic. Opening up property data at a national scale in the middle of unprecedented attacks on law firms, lenders, and public bodies is not innovation. It is negligence.
Modernisation built on unexamined assumptions is a gamble with the public’s trust, their assets, and the integrity of the property market itself.
“Coalition participants include representatives from high street and specialist lenders, national and regional conveyancing firms, estate agency groups, property technology and data providers, search providers, surveyors, and public bodies including HM Land Registry (HMLR).”
Could we have some names of the participants please, and some idea of how this might work with all of the other “roadmaps” and “projects” going on at the moment.
Yet more propaganda from people who know so little. How about trying to verify “data” that comes from the developers? They continue to mis-sell to the public by inflating house prices and providing deceptively low service charges and some are now so desperate to sell they are saying they will pay service charge for 2 years?
Road maps are silly – everyone knows when you are driving an accident can happen at any moment, no matter the amount ‘reasonable care’ you may take. You can’t expect trust to be handed over. It must be earned. So far none of this is earning my trust.
It’s not the data causing fall throughs, it’s people losing patience with bullying estate agents and incompetent conveyancers. None of this seems to factor in that England and Wales operate on “chains”.
I think the government started this road mapping exercise in the 1960’s and still they are on a road to nowhere – JOKES. A private non-government software company could resolve this, instead a hundred different committees and groups with huge name tags make important decisions … and nothing happens, the inertia of failure is astounding. Just as Vistry is likely to go under having coupled itself to the government to provide social housing, lack of clarity and execution of anything in the housing sector is deafening – Rayner’s inability as Housing secretary to get her own SDLT affairs correct being a metaphor for all that is wrong – novices at the steering wheel of a bus that has so many U-turns the passengers just want to get off – not being partisan ALL governments have been shockingly bad at sorting the sstc to exchange pathway in the UK.