Lloyd: Real-world benefits of smart data
A digital property pack which combines multiple sources of data into a “single source of truth” for home buyers, sellers, conveyancers and other professionals has won a government prize worth £50,000.
Moverly estimates that average transaction times could be reduced from 22 weeks to only 12 if its prototype was adopted at scale.
Moverly was one of 10 teams selected as finalists for the Smart Data Challenge Prize funded by the Department for Business and Trade, and given the chance to test and develop their solutions in a specially created sandbox.
Smart data is defined as allowing “individual consumers and business customers to access and share their data simply and securely with third parties, enabling those third parties to provide innovative services”.
A “single source of truth” was needed by sellers, buyers, conveyancers, surveyors, and mortgage providers to smooth the homebuying process. The information involved included HM Land Registry, energy performance certificate, council tax, utilities and restrictions data, title documents, searches and legal forms.
The packs have been developed to be reused throughout the homebuying journey, challenge organisers said. “The seller’s conveyancer can resolve issues pre-emptively, such as mismatched names on title deeds.
“Buyers receive simple, plain-English summaries with red, amber, and green risk flags. Buyers’ conveyancers receive the same trusted data, already packaged with provenance.
“Surveyors draw on the pack to auto-populate reports, while lenders can access validated data and can issue mortgage-ready status or full offers within minutes.”
As well as reducing average transaction times, Moverly estimated that it could fall-through rates from over 25% to below 10%.
“It believes that this could save each household £1,000-£2,000 in direct costs, while market-wide efficiencies could exceed £2-3bn annually through reduced duplication and delay. Home moving becomes faster, more transparent, and less stressful.”
Ed Molyneux, founder and chief technology officer of Moverley, commented: “Finding a home and making a new life in it should be one of the most positive experiences, instead it is fraught with stress and uncertainty, and if a transaction falls through it can be heartbreaking. Why should anyone settle for this?
“In the UK it takes an average of 22 weeks to complete a transaction, and more than one in four sales collapse – often very late in the process. Each failure leaves buyers and sellers with legal fees, survey costs, and wasted time.”
Reframing the transaction around “trusted, reusable data” was key, he explained. “Instead of information being repeatedly requested, re-keyed, and re-verified, Digital Sale Ready Packs provide a single, trusted source of truth built on smart data principles.
“Each pack contains verified property data that can be confidently reused by buyers, sellers, agents, conveyancers, surveyors, and lenders. This enables once-only data capture and transparent sharing between participants.”
Baroness Lloyd, minister for digital economy, added: “Cutting-edge ideas and innovation is central to this prize and I congratulate Moverly and all the teams that competed this year on their projects.
“We want to harness the power of smart data so it can have real-world benefits for consumers but also help cut red tape and boost the economy, and that’s why this prize is so important.”
Meanwhile, a government-backed Open Property Coalition to accelerate the digitisation of the home-buying process has been unveiled by the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT).
Supported by the smart data team at the Department for Business and Trade, the coalition will convene a range of public and private-sector organisations, including the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, HM Land Registry, the Open Property Data Association, property companies, financial institutions, regulators, conveyancers and proptechs.
In a statement, CFIT said: “Its work will build on existing research, industry pilots and stakeholder initiatives and explore how emerging technologies like digital ID, tokenisation and trust frameworks could help reimagine the process in the future.
“Outputs will include a roadmap for delivering a fully-fledged smart data scheme for the homebuying sector and potentially a prototype smart data solution.”
CFIT, which is publicly funded, brings government, industry and regulators together to solve “systemic challenges to financial innovation”.
So let’s get this straight: the government has awarded £50,000 of public money to a private digital pack provider to advance a specific solution at the very same time it is running a national consultation on how the home buying and selling system should work. That raises a fair question about neutrality. Is the consultation genuinely exploring options, or is a preferred model already being promoted before the profession has been heard?
Why this matters is simple. The issue is not whether digital property packs can be built – the technology clearly exists. The real question is who becomes the custodian of some of the UK’s most sensitive property data, and who carries the legal responsibility when that data is wrong.
A “single source of truth” does not exist in English property law. Title, searches, planning records, utilities data and EPCs all contain gaps, inconsistencies and errors that require legal interpretation, not aggregation. No commercial platform can convert imperfect datasets into certainty. Yet these products are marketed as “trusted”, while their terms routinely disclaim liability. In practice, the risk still sits squarely with conveyancers and consumers.
Even if cyber-security were flawless, serious concerns remain:
• No private company should control the nation’s property data infrastructure.
• Conveyancing is a legal risk-assessment process, not a data-retrieval exercise.
• RAG-ratings trivialise complex legal issues such as covenants, lease defects and boundaries.
• Deskilling the profession weakens consumer protection.
• It risks repeating the mistakes of HIPs: technocratic optimism without legal grounding.
We also need to look at who is shaping the agenda. The new government-backed Open Property Coalition is led by financial institutions, data organisations, regulators, proptech firms and central government – with conveyancers appearing last on the list. Those who bear the least risk are leading the design; those who bear the most risk are invited only at the margins. When legal professionals are peripheral, reform drifts towards commercial priorities rather than consumer protection.
This is how HIPs happened. This is how high-volume factory models were allowed to dominate. And this is how policy failure repeats.
Innovation is welcome – but innovation must follow consultation, not pre-empt it. If government wants a safer, faster, more reliable system, then legal experts must be central to the design. Without that, we simply build a clever digital wrapper around a system whose core risks remain unchanged.