Data is the Bricks, Commercial Model is the Mortar for Home Buying and Mortgages

In this episode of the Digital Disruption Podcast, Pete Gatenby is joined by Spence Wyer, Chief Product Officer at TwentyCi, to discuss the Government’s home buying and selling reform roadmap and what it will actually take to make it work.

Spence brings a view from across the transaction, having previously led product and technology at HomeTrack and worked at CLS before joining TwentyCi, one of the UK’s leading providers of residential property market intelligence.

His opening challenge is that most people will read the roadmap as policy, when it reads more like a data specification. Nearly every measure in it comes back to the grade of data being used. Spence explains what makes property information financial grade rather than subgrade, and offers a striking example. Environment Agency flood data is free but is explicitly not intended for use at property level, so a buyer can receive a pack from an estate agent showing high flood risk while the lender’s own file shows medium or none for the same property. If data is going to be trusted earlier in the process, that gap has to close.

The conversation then turns to how data behaves over time. A transaction can run for five or six months, so Spence argues the data needs to be licensed from source for the duration of the sale and refreshed at key milestones; listing, offer, mortgage application and when the conveyancer starts work. He also makes the case for a two-way flow, where professionals who have physically seen the property can update the record rather than have it overwritten.

The harder question is who pays. With around one in three transactions still falling through, and typically failing late once everyone has committed, Spence describes a catch 22. Better data upfront looks like more waste, but it is the thing most likely to reduce the waste. The technology largely exists already, but the block sits in commercial models, liability and regulation rather than integration, and who should convene the industry conversation in the voluntary window before legislation arrives.

The episode closes on what good looks like twelve months from now, and a clear ask of lenders, agents, conveyancers and technology providers alike.