The Intermediary – August 2026 - Flipbook - Page 25
RESIDENTIAL
Opinion
Rewriting the
homebuying
infrastructure
F
or years, discussions
about improving the
housing market have
centred on affordability.
Stamp Duty, mortgage
rates, planning reform
and housing supply have dominated
political debate. Yet anyone who has
actually bought a home knows that
affordability is only part of the story.
The Ministry of Housing,
Communities and Local Government’s
latest announcement on reforming
the process is therefore significant,
not because it introduces a single
revolutionary idea, but because it
finally acknowledges something
the industry has known for years:
the transaction itself has become
outdated. A process that routinely
takes four to six months, sees one
in three sales collapse, and costs
buyers, sellers and the wider economy
hundreds of millions of pounds each
year is no longer fit for purpose.
The proposed reforms are sensible.
Earlier provision of information
through sales packs, greater use of
digital identity, electronic signatures,
AI-assisted conveyancing and more
consistent property data all address
genuine friction points. They
recognise that much of today’s delay
is not caused by a lack of effort from
professionals, but by fragmented
information, duplicated activity and
disconnected systems.
Digital transformation should
not mean accelerating inefficient
processes. It should mean redesigning
them altogether.
Whether supporting lenders
with richer property intelligence,
improving valuation workflows or
enabling access to trusted data through
innovations such as Lender Hub,
our objective has never simply been
digitisation for its own sake.
For decades, the industry has
accepted an extraordinary amount of
repeated effort. The same property
information is requested multiple
times. Identity is verified repeatedly.
Data is rekeyed across numerous
systems. Documents are produced,
checked and recreated by different
parties despite oen containing
identical information. Every
handoff introduces delay. Every
delay introduces uncertainty. Every
uncertainty increases the risk of a
transaction failing. What creates
value is certainty.
A lender that has immediate access
to reliable property information
makes beer lending decisions. A
conveyancer working from consistent
digital records spends less time
chasing missing information. Estate
agents can manage expectations more
effectively. Buyers understand what
they are purchasing much earlier
in the process. Sellers avoid nasty
surprises. The common denominator
is trusted data and timely access to it.
The Government’s ambition to
reduce transaction times by around
four weeks and significantly reduce
fall-throughs will not be achieved
by policy announcements alone. It
will require the industry to embrace
common standards, interoperable
systems and far beer use of data. This
will require investment, but also a
change in mindset.
Too oen, transformation
projects have been justified through
operational savings, but in a world
of increasing scrutiny, the primary
objective should be improving
outcomes for consumers.
A question of productivity
If buyers can move with greater
certainty, if lenders can make more
informed decisions, if professionals
MARK BLACKWELL
is COO at Cotality
spend less time administering
transactions and more time advising
customers, everyone benefits.
The mortgage market has
already demonstrated that digital
transformation works when it
is implemented thoughtfully.
Automated valuation models (AVMs),
richer property datasets, digital
identity solutions and integrated
lender platforms have steadily reduced
friction across individual parts of the
customer journey. The next challenge
is joining those improvements
together, so the transaction operates as
one connected ecosystem.
Services such as Lender Hub
demonstrate how trusted property
intelligence can be embedded directly
into lender workflows, enabling faster
decisions without compromising
governance or risk management. It is
about giving decision-makers access
to beer information at the point
they need it.
The infrastructure supporting
homebuying has remained largely
unchanged, while consumer
expectations, technology and the
wider financial services industry
have evolved dramatically. The
Government’s announcement is
recognition that process has become
every bit as important as policy.
If we want a housing market that
is faster, fairer and more resilient,
we must stop treating digital
transformation as a technology
project. It is an infrastructure project,
and the winners will not simply be
those that digitise existing processes,
they will be those that use trusted data
to redesign them entirely. ●
August 2026 | The Intermediary
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