Big successes mark pioneering Open Property Data Association’s first year
A pioneering association campaigning to revolutionise the property industry is celebrating its first anniversary this month after achieving significant milestones.
Founded last June, the Open Property Data Association is on a mission to speed up the notoriously slow homebuying process by sharing digital property information across the housing market. OPDA has called on the Government to digitise the entire home buying and selling process within three years.
Currently, less than one per cent of property data is openly available in a digital format. Converting property data sources and documents to a digital format and making it shareable through open data standards is essential to support a digital homebuying experience. OPDA’s aim is for every company, in every part of the mortgage and property chain, to share open data in a digital, standardised, and trusted format.
In its first year alone, OPDA’s successes have included:
- Delivering its framework for property data standards which has made free and shareable data tools available across the property industry. Those using OPDA’s data standard for digital property packs have seen time reduced from offer accepted on a house and a mortgage to exchange of contracts within 15 days
- OPDA’s chair Maria Harris giving evidence last month to The Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Select Committee’s ‘Improving the home buying and selling process’ inquiry
- Contributing to work by the Digital Property Market Steering Group, a coalition of government and industry partners, on data, open standards, trust and interoperability, and shareable digital identity
- Grown its membership to include Lloyds Banking Group, Zoopla, Hometrack and Alto (part of Houseful), Phoebus, Finova Tech, as well as Home Sale Pack, Lenderhive, Veya, and Nokkel.
Several of its executive committee members including Coadjute, Moverly, Kotini and Groundsure have passed OPDA’s formal accreditation process through implementing data standards that work in line with OPDA’s property data trust framework.
Maria Harris, chair of OPDA, commented: “I am immensely proud of what we’ve achieved at OPDA in a very short space of time. Our mission is a vital one. Having accurate and trustable data about property is hugely important to restoring confidence and creating certainty in the market. I am hugely grateful to our members who have committed to bringing about genuine, positive change that we are seeing the industry getting behind.”
Digital property completions platform PEXA is one of OPDA’s largest members. Angela Hesketh, head of Market Development UK at PEXA, said: “Over the past year, we’ve been on an incredible journey at OPDA, making major inroads into raising awareness of the importance of shareable, digital data. We’ve grabbed the interest of the property industry. It’s great to be working with a group of like-minded people towards the same goal of making the consumer homebuying experience the best it can be.”
Ed Molyneux, co-founder of Moverly and chair of the OPDA Schema Working Group, said: “We really believe the key to digital transformation in this industry is the building of a broad ecosystem based on open data standards. It’s really encouraging to see all of our members engaging with the collaborative development of our Property Data Trust Framework, so we can all finally unlock the potential of trustable, securely exchanged data.”
OPDA membership also includes innovative start-ups such as Kotini which has created a platform used by estate agencies to automate their sales onboarding and compliance. Kotini founder Kieran Witt said: “Property data needs to be standardised if innovation is to happen. As a small company, we’ve benefitted hugely from OPDA membership because we’ve been able to tap into the brain power and experiences of other members to define what property data standards are. This has meant we’ve been able to adopt clear standards from the start, shortcutting the time to innovate and deliver value. As a result, we’ve been able to support 1400 property transactions using the standards since joining OPDA.”
OPDA is calling for other organisations across the industry, from lenders and mortgage brokers, to estate agents and conveyancers, to join OPDA to help make change happen and shape the way the digitisation process evolves.
