Case study
The Open Property Data Association – standardising the home-buying process
The Open Property Data Association (OPDA) is an independent industry body which aims to “promote the application of open property data for the benefit of all”.
Established in 2023 by Chair Maria Harris, the association recognised that the UK’s property data is held across several different organisations, ranging from government departments to local authorities, from private organisations to financial institutions. Less than one per cent of this data is digitised and there is no common format, standardised API, or trust framework to enable it to be effectively shared.
The absence of a common standard is one of the main causes of delays in the homebuying chain, with each party (estate agents, mortgage lenders and brokers, surveyors, and solicitors) having to source and verify their own data for their part in the process.
Maria Harris,
Chair, Open Property Data Association
“The lack of access to real-time, digital, and verified personal and property data is a key contributor to inefficiency in the home-buying process, where each government department and industry participant needs to rely on their own compliance, data gathering and manual checks to complete their part of the transaction.
For customers this creates a lack of transparency, control, confidence, and access to the key data needed at each stage of the transaction to make informed decisions.”
The delays this causes are stressful for buyers and sellers, undermine confidence in the home-buying process, incur unnecessary administration costs, and can sometimes cause the entire chain to collapse.
‘Smart Data Big Bang’
Home-buying is one of the seven economic sectors identified in the ‘Smart Data Big Bang’, announced in the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, as being able to benefit from the increased data sharing and standardisation similar to that delivered by open banking, all of which will deliver wider economic benefits and cost-savings to consumers, SMEs and the public sector.
Framework for property data
In February 2024, OPDA launched the latest version of its framework for property data standards. The framework aims to speed up the digitisation of the property market, helping to make transactions easier and more efficient for both homebuyers and property professionals.
Converting all property data sources and documents to a standardised digital format and making them shareable through open data standards will support this much-needed transition to digital property transactions.
The toolkit includes a common data dictionary, a standard way to describe property attributes, and a methodology for sharing data with trust and provenance attached. It is available to the property industry and its software providers free of charge, without any proprietary licences.
National Trading Standards material information
Developed in collaboration with key industry organisations such as the Home Buying and Selling Group, the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, and Moverly, which offers an automated system for managing property data, the latest version of the toolkit complies with the National Trading Standards (NTS) material information on property listings. Published last year, the guidance aims to help buyers, agents and conveyancers make informed decisions on property purchases by offering verified, transparent and accurate information.
Currently, the data needed by agents to comply with these rules is accessed from numerous data sources, including sellers, and can be hard to both aggregate and verify.
As well as accelerating the digitisation of the home-buying journey, from start to finish, the OPDA framework will also support further innovation in the property and prop-tech sectors.
Both OPDA and Moverly were shortlisted in the Department of Business and Trade’s Smart Data Discovery Challenge, which invited organisations from different sectors to submit their ideas for smart data use cases that could benefit consumers, small businesses and wider society.
