The Customer Was Always Ready: Home Buying Reform from the Mover’s Seat

The Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap from the home mover’s seat.

Research into home movers has said the same thing for years; people want to enter their information once, they want their data shared between the parties handling the move, and they want to see progress. More than eight in ten view a digital property pack positively, more than seven in ten want their data shared, and around two thirds would complete their upfront information in a single sitting if asked. The appetite was never the problem.

Therefore, it is worth being clear about what the Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap, published on 19 June, actually represents. It’s not a leap ahead of what home movers want. It is the system catching up to customers who were ready all along.

If we read the roadmap from the home mover’s seat, it answers three frustrations that anyone who has bought or sold a home will recognise;

1. Repetition

2. Visibility

3. Certainty

Let’s look at these in a bit more detail.

Being asked the same thing many times

The first is repetition. Your identity is checked by the estate agent, then again by the broker, then by the lender, then by the conveyancer. The same documents, four times over, with none of the parties able to trust the others’ work.

The roadmap’s headline measures – binding contracts and upfront sales packs – will likely take the spotlight over the coming weeks and months, but the line that does the most for the customer’s daily experience is quieter. On anti-money-laundering checks, the government commits to information being gathered once, at the earliest possible stage, so buyers and sellers stop facing the same check at every door. It points to reusing data the Land Registry already holds to make remortgaging simpler. This is the principle that reshaped payments, where something captured once moves through the rest of the process without being re-keyed. Applied to a house move it is plain to describe and considerable to live through. Ask the customer once and let the verified answer travel.

Not knowing where you are

The second is visibility. The roadmap names this precisely. Today a buyer or seller often cannot see which parts of their transaction have progressed, what is still outstanding, or who is responsible for a hold-up. The move happens to them, somewhere out of view, and they chase it by phone and email.

The answer the roadmap sets out is a transaction that moves through milestones every party can see, and tools that let people track and progress their move when they want to. It is worth noticing what kind of change that indicates. Knowing where your move has got to, isn’t really about the data itself, it’s about whether the businesses involved are working from the same picture of the transaction. Visibility is a property of how the work is coordinated, not of any single document.

Carrying the risk until the end

The third is exposure. When a move goes wrong, it tends to go wrong late. Around one in three transactions fall through, and the roadmap puts the cost to consumers alone at roughly £400 million a year and estimates of the cost to the economy far higher. Most of that pain lands after months of fees and emotional commitment, because under the current system nothing holds the parties together until the very end.

The reforms move certainty forward. Comprehensive information arrives at the start, and commitment is asked for earlier, so the customer spends less of the journey exposed. The order is deliberate, and the roadmap is careful about it. You cannot fairly ask someone to commit before they have the information to commit on, which is why the upfront pack comes before the binding contract.

It’s on us to build

Here is the catch. Every one of these three fixes is real, and none of them are things the customer can see or build.

Ask-once depends on a verified result being able to move between organisations. A move you can track depends on those organisations coordinating around the same milestones. And certainty earlier depends on trusted information being ready at the start and relied on by everyone downstream. The customer will feel the outcome, but the infrastructure that delivers it sits entirely with industry.

The roadmap is candid about where that infrastructure comes from; Government sets the conditions (Smart Data, the data standards it wants the industry to adopt, and Land Registry opening its data), but it says plainly that industry is best placed to build the products on top.

A document written almost entirely in the customer’s voice turns out, underneath, to be a brief for the rest of us. The promises are made to the home mover. Whether they are kept depends on whether the industry accepts that this was never a technology problem but a configuration problem, and it is now the work we have to do.

Where lenders go from here

The temptation will be to read the reform as a set of buying decisions. The old “wait for the winning platform to emerge, then adopt it” tactic. That will be the most common mistake the market will make, and the most expensive, because it treats a question about how the industry coordinates as a question about which product to purchase. This is an operating-model decision before it is a procurement one, and where Horizontal Digital Integration or HDI becomes the defining strategic starting point.

That operating model re-design needs to start internally. The promise of “ask-once” only pays off once a lender has redesigned its own mortgage journey to trust a verified check completed upstream, rather than repeating it. No vendor delivers the internal work that defines roles, processes and workflows around a redesigned journey, and this is where the real advantage compounds.

The next step is to interrogate everyone you might connect to; vendors, partners, infrastructure. Three questions sort the field faster than any feature list: are you open or closed loop, and what would we have to adopt to take part; what role do you play in the new home buying infrastructure; and are you Smart Data ready, to which standards?

The distinction these questions protect:

• Converge at the data layer and compete above it
• One connection to a shared rail, not a bet on a single platform (single connection, not single owner)
• Orchestration is one layer of the work, not the operating model that governs it
• Engaging a vendor is not a replacement for an HDI strategy

The final step is all around timing. The design choices are being made now, not when legislation lands. The call for evidence on a property Smart Data scheme is due this year, with the data-standards accreditation scheme and the work on AI conveyancing standards following next year. The lenders who wait for statute will arrive after the rules have been written. The advantage goes to those who ready their operating model for the new infrastructure now, rather than wait for legislation and play a 2-year game of catch-up with those that got to work early.

Smart Data, data standards and trust frameworks are necessary but not sufficient in achieving the outcomes we’re trying to achieve. Data exchange and orchestration are emerging layers of this infrastructure, with data exchange being the critical point of engagement for all organisations. The value, therefore, is in the operating model that turns data into outcomes, which is Horizontal Digital Integration, and it rewards the firms that start designing now rather than waiting for a platform to win.