This week Terrafirma celebrates 5 years of positive disruption and innovation across the UK’s property and conveyancing sectors with bold plans for an engaging educational series and important product update. From an idea borne from their Founder and CEO, Tom Backhouse’s passion to communicate GeoScience to professionals and wider public, Terrafirma are now the leading and largest independent provider of mining and ground stability reports in the UK.
Terrafirma’s mission is to enable everyone to better understand the ground. Reflecting on their impact on the ground risk and property searches industry over the past 5 years, they recognise the part that their partners and clients play in their success.
“I am not sure where these last 5 years have gone. I would like to say a huge thank you to our partners, resellers, and clients for supporting us on our journey to enable everyone to better understand the ground. 2020 has been challenging, but through crisis comes opportunity and our fantastic team have worked tirelessly to deliver vital updates to our products and a new education campaign unlike anything we have ever done before. We’re staying true to what we’re good at, which is understanding the ground, protecting our customer, and integrating with new technology and software to add value.” – Tom Backhouse
A key milestone was becoming the first commercial organisation licensed by the Law Society to produce an official alternative to the Coal Authority’s CON29M Coal Mining Report. This, coupled with being the first to include a Mine Entry Interpretive Report as standard and modelling the zone of influence of all 173,000 coal mine entries, have created choice, opportunity, and enhanced coal mining risk assessment. To date, Terrafirma are the second largest supplier of CON29M reports, providing risk assessment and advice on almost 70,000 reports.
Even more significant for Terrafirma has been shifting the emphasis from complete focus on coal mining risk in property and land transactions to one that considers all types of mining and natural ground hazards. Renowned and experienced mining, subsidence and data experts have joined the company, reinforcing Terrafirma’s commitment to technical excellence, and strengthening the knowledge base that feeds their reports.
The Terrafirma Ground Report was the first to offer conveyancing professionals risk assessment on all mining and ground stability hazards, providing their clients with a wider remit of ground risk assessment and additional protection than was previously possible. The response from conveyancers across the country has been fantastic and has validated the need for such a product.
“We’re proud of what we have achieved over the past 5 years and are delighted with feedback we’ve had from the market. We strive to put everyone involved in the property transaction at the heart of our products and we look forward to working with our valued partners over the next 5 years and more.” – Tom Backhouse
Read some messages from Terrafirma’s long-standing partners here.