We live in a technological world and pretty much everything is done online or controlled by an app these days. Not everything is quite up with modern technology yet and one area that is still pretty paper driven is the land registry, but they recently announced plans to introduce cutting edge digital tools to make the property market fully digital in their “Enabling a world-leading Property Market strategy 2022+” document. In this article we will take a look at this strategy.
The strategy sets out 5 main areas of focus:
- Land registration – providing a secure and efficient land registration process
- Conveyancing – enabling property to be bought and sold digitally
- Property market – providing near real time property information
- Wider economy – Providing an accessible digital register
- Wider economy – leading research and accelerating change with property market partners
We will look at the first four of those in a bit more detail.
Land Registration
According to the Land Registry their aim is to provide a land registration service that is 100% digital which will provide a totally fraud free and accurate register of all registered properties. They aim to improve the speed of the service by introducing automation and integrated digital services. The aim is that by 2025 70% of all ownership changes are fully digital and will only take seconds. There is already a live system which will, by the end of 2022 be able to accept nearly all application types. Added to this they also plan to introduce much more rigid digital identity checks and controls to reduce fraud.
Digital buying and selling
The aim here is to provide a totally digital and paper free process for buying and selling properties. The aim is to connect banks, conveyancers, agents, buyers and sellers all together on a common digital platform. In 2023-2024 they will integrate their systems more with other conveyancing platforms and set up standard data and connection settings with a view that by 2024-2025 the buying and selling process could be paperless as a norm.
Property information
The aim here is to provide almost instantaneous and real-time property market information such as ownership, location, mortgages and land charges. They hope to have a fully digital land charges register within 4 years and ultimately have their information services fully integrated with a fully digital conveyancing system.
Digital Register Data
The aim here is to have as much data available digitally as possible. This data will be easy to find and access and much more readily interoperable with other data. The hope is that this improved accessibility and interoperability will give a much better insight into land-use, planning and adherence to net zero targets. The data will also allow a better understanding of land use, property pricing by region, types of restrictive covenants and also allow consultants and planners a better context of overall land use.
Although the strategy goes out to 2027, which is some years away, there has already been a lot of work implemented to digitise the property market. Further digitisation and automation should make the whole process of buying and selling properties faster, easier and more transparent, which will allow much easier access to property ownership and land charges information and will make the property market much more secure against fraud. All of these facets will only improve the property market.
