Conveyancing giant backs group promoting faster sales progression

The journey towards faster sales progression has been given a significant boost after the organisation promoting the digital transformation of the property industry revealed one of the UK’s leading conveyancing firms has joined its cause.

The Open Property Data Association (OPDA) has welcomed Simply Conveyancing as an associate member with its boss saying the association’s work is ‘pivotal’ to faster property sales.

Simply is used by some 200 estate agencies across the UK and processes ‘thousands’ of sales every year.

Founded last June, the OPDA promotes the industry-wide adoption of open property data and technology standards. It has a steep hill to climb – less than 1% of property data is openly available in a digital format at the moment.

Slow

But the OPDA says that, unless all players in the market including estate agents but most importantly mortgage firms begin collaborating to convert property data sources and documents to a digital format and make it shareable through open data standards, the home buying process will remain slow and frustrating.

The association, which is coordinating this effort, has had the ear of Government, wants all home buying information digitised within three years.

Simply Conveyancing is the first independent conveyancing law firm to join the OPDA as an associate member and it has been taking the lead on the adoption of open data standards in the domestic conveyancing legal services space.

Trusted data

Maria Harris, chair of OPDA, says: “Having accurate and trustable data about property is hugely important to restoring confidence and creating certainty in the market. Simply Conveyancing’s commitment to trust, transparency and provenance very much complements our ethos as an association”.

James Slater (main image, left with COO Sue Bence), Chief Information Officer at Simply Conveyancing says: “Our mission at Simply is to deliver exceptional conveyancing services. Key to enabling that mission is the removal of complexity and acceleration of the legal process for buying and/or selling a residential property, eliminating pain points and frustration for our clients, and we see the open data standards as pivotal to achieving this.”