Buying a home has never been the fastest or slickest process, but we've always found ways to make it work and invested in our online systems and portals to improve the customer and broker experience. The process still takes a lot of manual intervention and requires everyone involved to validate, share and chase the same information and documents again and again.

Despite the promises of silver bullet solutions and huge investments in technology, the experience for customers and
industry has never been worse:

• Transaction fall-through rate is stubbornly consistent at c.30%
• Delayed transactions have increased with average time to completion at 22 weeks - up from 16 weeks in 2017
• Home buying has become the 2nd worst life event, generating huge levels of stress for everyone involved

Transforming the homebuying journey needs more than just technology. The data we need isn't available when we need it, we find out the most critical information too late in the process, and information isn't available in ways that make it easy to validate and share. More than 99% of property information including titles, deeds, searches, planning, etc. exist in non-digital or non-standardised formats, making it difficult to access and share in real time. Even digital identity, one of the easiest asks for the customer to complete, is disjointed with no industry-wide consensus on how it should be done and how to make it safe and secure for the customer to verify once and share their credentials with the parties who need it.

The Key to Reform: Data and Trust

Open banking and other digital customer journeys have proven that open data standards and trust frameworks are the foundations of a more efficient, transparent, and customer centric experience.

Open data standards are essential for safe and easy access to data, verifying its provenance, and enabling shareability - all critical to the digitisation of the property market. We need a way of surfacing this data to the customer and connecting every part of the home buying journey with the real-time information they need at the right point in time. Trust frameworks underpin the infrastructure we need to allow safe and secure access and sharing of property and identity data between lenders, conveyancers, buyers, and sellers, by identifying the approved sources of the data and setting standards to accredit the industry providers who can collect and share that data on behalf of the customer.

Legislating the future of homebuying

The Data (Access and Use) Bill now entering its 3rd stage in the House of Lords, is a critical next step in this journey. This new legislation supports consumers' rights to access and have control over sharing their property, financial, and digital identity data. Homebuying will be one of the first use cases delivered, demonstrating Government commitment to this transformation and the importance of open data standards and a property data trust framework in shaping the future.

The next iteration of the Digital Identity & Attributes Trust Framework will include a supplementary code specifically for property, setting out the additional guidance and requirements for one single identity check that meets everyone's governance standards. Legislation and collaboration are driving this transformation.

Open data and API standards already enable digital upfront property packs and seamless data sharing across the transaction. Work is underway with government to create the property data trust framework, ensuring that source data is digitised, verified, and can be relied on. Members and brokers will be looking to lenders to shape and support the transition to a much improved homebuying experience.

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This article was first published in Society Matters magazine

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