HM Land Registry has been in the property data business for more than 150 years. It probably has more information on the real estate market than any surveyor out there. It is used by tens of thousands of people every day. Now, it is seeking to embrace the same digital transformation that every property business is having to undergo.
Here, John Abbott, director of digital, data and technology at HM Land Registry, talks about why the body is digitising, the benefits it will bring and the barriers it faces along the way.
Digital transformation strategy
“In 2017 we published a strategy to become the world’s leading land registry for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data,” says Abbott. “As part of that, we are investing in a digital transformation programme that will make it easier for all of our customers to interact with Land Registry.”
That strategy laid out a number of aims for HM Land Registry, including digitising and automating some 95% of its daily transactions by 2022. But achieving that aim is not going to be simple. As a custodian of land and property ownership valued in excess of £4tn and some 25m titles, digital transformation will not happen overnight, and potentially not within the five-year time period the body gave itself back in 2017.
“We do about 100,000 searches of the register every day, and 20,000 times a day people will update the register,” says Abbott. “Every single one of those transactions comes to us via a PDF. About 4,000 case workers are required to read those PDFs and then update the land register. About 20% of those 20,000 PDFs have some kind of error in them.”
Abbott says HM Land Registry is working to transform the system into something that “feels a little bit more 21st century” and makes it easier not just to search the register, but to make sure that data being loaded into it is right first time.
“To do that, we are investing in the register itself, making it more structured, more machine-readable and more machine-interpretable so that it enables us to automate the update of the register. Also, crucially, to make the data that is stored inside the register a bit easier for people to consume and understand,” says Abbott.
Digital Streets
“We think that by investing in digitising our data we can create a platform upon which we can do the business of land registration as quickly and effectively as possible, but also enable people to more easily extract insight from the data we hold,” he adds.
That desire to help people extract more insight has seen HM Land Registry launch its Digital Streets project, a sandbox in which numerous parties – from the RICS, conveyancers and lenders to other government departments – can play about with and test cutting-edge technologies such as smart contracts and distributed ledgers to see if they can deliver simpler, faster and cheaper services for the property market.
Start-up accelerator
It has also partnered with Ordnance Survey to create Clerkenwell-based accelerator Geovation. Through Geovation, HM Land Registry is able to connect with start-ups and get ideas about what people can do with the data it holds.
“The point of making data available is that you don’t know what you don’t know,” says Abbott cryptically. “By making it available, people will do things with it that we never expected.”
Abbott says HM Land Registry is already working with a start-up that hopes to be able to build 10,000 affordable homes on rooftops and that it was Land Registry data that was helping develop that product.
Key to innovations
Digitisation of Land Registry data, says proptech commentator and Alpha Property Insight founder Dan Hughes, holds the key to a host of potential innovations in real estate, from tokenisation to automated valuation models. “As it becomes more automated, not only will it give access to the individual databases more accurately, better, faster and everything else, it will also mean that you can start doing more things with the data sets,” says Hughes. “As it gets more accessible, you will be able to get more intelligence out of it in an exponential way.”
To find out more about how HM Land Registry is digitising and what its transformation will mean for the real estate community, listen to Abbott and Hughes on EG’s TechTalk Radio podcast.
To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@egi.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @estatesgazette
