Mark Blackwell, COO of Cotality UK discusses why data ownership and accountability will be critical to the Government’s homebuying and selling reforms. Article originally published in The Intermediary
A property transaction rarely collapses because someone lied. More often, it’s because a piece of data – a survey result, a search, a chain confirmation – didn’t hold up when it mattered, and by then it was too late to fix. The Government’s new homebuying and selling roadmap has real answers for a lot of this. But it’s more cautious on the one question that will determine whether any of it actually works: who owns the data once it starts moving between sellers, surveyors, lenders and brokers?
We welcomed the Government’s consultation on home buying and selling reform last October – it backed the approach Cotality had already taken to digitising the surveying and valuation process. Now the roadmap has been published, and on the surface it delivers on two of the three pillars we flagged last year. Mandatory upfront information – via sales packs covering condition, leasehold costs, chain status and flood risk – is going ahead, with legislation to follow when parliamentary time allows.
Digital acceleration is also progressing, backed by a smart data and digital identity workstream and a call for evidence due later this year. Lenders and brokers shouldn’t wait for that process to be presented as finished before getting involved – this is where the shape of future data-sharing standards will actually be decided.
The third pillar – trusted, well-governed data – is where the roadmap is more cautious, and rightly so. It confirms that sellers retain overall responsibility for the sales pack, with surveyors accountable for condition-related information. But the question we raised last year isn’t fully closed: if a seller commissions a survey, what right does the resulting data carry for everyone downstream, including the lender?
The Government has committed to producing guidance, ahead of legislation, on the provenance, reliability and usable lifespan of that information. That’s the right instinct, but it means the detail that matters most to underwriting – how long survey data stays valid, who can rely on it, and what happens when it’s disputed – is still being written. Surveyors are best placed to lead on that, since they’re already the ones the roadmap holds accountable for the condition of data at the centre of the question.
Consultation responses show conveyancers were the professional group least convinced about including searches and condition reports in the sales pack, and their concerns clustered around exactly this: data going stale, lenders not accepting it, buyers not trusting it. Getting provenance right before mandating reuse is a far more sensible sequence than the one Home Information Packs followed in the 2000s, when the infrastructure and industry buy-in weren’t ready and the policy collapsed as a result.
For the mortgage industry, the main takeaway is that the roadmap creates the conditions for better-underwritten, faster decisions – but only if the data entering the system is standardised and its provenance is verifiable from the point of survey onward. That’s the same discipline Cotality has spent a decade applying to the surveying stage of a transaction, now needed across sales pack data more broadly.
Homebuyers, on the whole, already trust that a property transaction will eventually complete. What they don’t trust is how long it takes and how easily it can collapse near the finish line. This roadmap is a phased attempt to fix that, but its success now rests on identifying who is accountable for the data once it starts moving between sellers, surveyors, lenders and brokers.
