The entire home buying and selling process should be digitised within the next three years, Open Property Data Association chair, Maria Harris, has argued.
Speaking at a Commons select committee hearing on improving the home buying and selling process, Harris said digitisation would improve both the consumer and broker's experience of buying a house.
She explained companies using OPDA’s data standard for digital property packs had seen time reduced from offers accepted on a house and a mortgage, to exchange of contracts in just 15 days.
This reduction occurred “with zero fall throughs, zero fraud, a much better customer experience and more certainty around the moving date”, Harris pointed out.
She added: “It is also taking hundreds of hours out of the process as that waste of time is not there.
“Therefore, if we had widespread adoption of standards and we digitised the data at source we would reform the home moving process dramatically.”
Harris called for home sellers to instruct a conveyancer right at the start of the process even before a property was listed.
The committee questioned the impact of this, and the conclusion was that it would “significantly shorten” the time period of a house purchase, while providing more certainty that a transaction is likely to go ahead.
Where a similar process operates in Scotland it was revealed there was very little, if any, drop off due to speculative sales.
The Home Buying and Selling Group also gave evidence, specifically on the complexity of the current process, with CEO Kate Faulkner revealing there was a list of 300 things that the buyer, lender or removal company may need to know before approving for a house purchase.
There were also potentially 15 companies involved in even a simple purchase.
Faulkner stated: “You don’t know if you’ve bought into the wrong services, you won’t know until it’s too late.
“We have fantastic runners in each sector, but we’re not good at passing that baton to each other.”
Harris added: “It is not helpful that all these batons are based on paper or forms, and they are all slightly different and need different things.
“The entire process is siloed and fragmented. It is based on pushing bits of paper and documents about and manually checking identity, property details or validating information between different systems that don’t speak to each other.”
Harris added that digitisation could happen within the next three years, but warned that the market needs to move collectively and take the same step at the same time.
The OPDA is now calling for other organisations across the industry to help make this change happen and shape the way the digitisation process evolves - before the government mandates it to happen.
tom.dunstan@ft.com
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