A conveyancer’s guide to the Property Data Trust Framework
Introduction: This time it’s different. No, really.
“Impossible.”
That’s the conclusion I came to when I’d done my research into digital conveyancing back in the summer of 2021.
I’d just left my previous company, FreeAgent, where my co-founders Olly, Roan and I had built an online accounting software company that had transformed the management of hundreds of thousands of freelancers’ finances.
We had approached building FreeAgent back in 2007 with a youthful naivete, and had created the product we’d wanted to have as freelancers ourselves, technical challenge be damned. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, so we learned the hard way about double-entry accounting and about how complex the UK business tax system is. But we did it anyway, and our ambition made all the difference to the kinds of problems we could solve for our customers.
Surely, I reasoned, I could bring the same ambition and useful ignorance to the conveyancing space.
I was wrong.
I knew I was wrong because it had been tried before, many times. Most of you will be old enough to remember Chain Matrix. And even if you don’t, you may remember Veyo. They had both failed, spectacularly, noisily and expensively. And as for those still trying to build such platforms, and there are several, I couldn’t see how they were going to succeed where HMLR and the Law Society had failed. And no, they don’t have new “AI”, “Big Data”, “Blockchain” or “GPT-3” magic wands.
As they say, the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Much as we all bemoan the lack of collaboration across the conveyancing transaction, it turns out that the answer is not “all you have to do is stop whatever it is you’re doing and use our new platform instead”. Human beings, and property professionals and firms in particular, just don’t work that way, unless governments tell them to.
Instead, I now firmly believe the answer lies in something much more boring-sounding: standards.
That’s why I’ve spent the last 18 months working as part of the Home Buying and Selling Group’s Tech sub-group, collaborating with the full range of industry partners, to bring the Property Data Trust Framework into the world. I want to explain why this time it really is different.
Part 1: Standards, Standards, Standards
If you’re ever having trouble sleeping, I recommend retiring to bed with the BS1363 specification. It relates, of course, to the common (but not garden) 13-amp 3-pin British mains socket outlet. Yes, it’s boring and technical but imagine life without it, with every electricity company, homebuilder, electrician and supplier of mains appliances vying to get you to use their special, proprietary and different socket designs.
Another set of standards are harder for the naked eye to see. They include the likes of TCP/IP, HTTP and HTML, and you may already know that these are among the standards that underpin the internet as we know it today. It’s safe to say that they have had a fairly large impact on our lives.
And yes, they’re boring and technical too. But imagine the internet without them, with every email system and online shop vying to get you to use their special, proprietary and different network and browser designs. In fact, that was what the internet was before the internet, if you remember Compuserve and AOL as I do fondly.
Popular as they were, those platforms never achieved the total global transformation that today’s internet has brought to the world, precisely because they weren’t built on open standards.
Unlike a proprietary network, an open standard is freely available for anyone to use and is managed by organisations like BSI or W3C which are vendor-agnostic. The standard may evolve, and in fact has to evolve to stay relevant, but it does so without favouring one vendor over another.
Because of this, manufacturers or internet service providers or search engine companies can safely make investments in using the standard. It benefits everyone, and makes possible the kinds of industry-wide transformation that make buying a steam mop, and doing so on amazon.co.uk, possible.
Of course sometimes politics get involved, and standards do compete and come and go, but in my view they are the unsung heroes of the modern world.
So what does that have to do with conveyancing? We’ll explain more in the next blog post
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