As digital transformation begins to pick up pace, with high street lenders Lloyds Banking Group and NatWest both announcing digital transaction milestones in recent weeks, property technology provider tmGroup explains why it’s getting behind an industry initiative to standardise data.
The announcement last week that Lloyds Banking Group, Connells Group and LMS have launched a fully digital home buying service built on the National Property Transaction Network (NPTN) is significant news for our industry. We have been part of this journey from the beginning, and we believe NPTN stands to make a real impact on the entire home moving journey.
The problems it is trying to solve are well understood. The average residential transaction in England and Wales takes over five months to complete. Around one in four of these falls through, often due to a lack of up-front information. Buyers and sellers are repeatedly asked for the same information by different parties, and issues arising late in the transaction can cause substantial delays, rework and sometimes the collapse of a sale altogether.
These are not new complaints. The industry has been diagnosing them for years. What is new is a credible, practical mechanism for addressing them at scale.
A straightforward idea
NPTN, underpinned by the Property Data Trust Framework, is built around a straightforward idea: that authenticated data, captured once at the start of a transaction, should be accessible to every party who needs it. Rather than asking conveyancers, agents, lenders, brokers and consumers to change how they work or who they work with, it creates reliable data sharing with authenticated parties across a transaction.
We have been a partner of Connells Group for many years, and we share their conviction that the industry needs structural change, not incremental tinkering. Chris Rosindale, chief operating officer at Connells Group, summed it up well at this week’s launch:
“Society needs a faster, more reliable, fully digitised housing transaction system that increases certainty, reduces fall throughs and supports housing mobility.”
That is precisely the problem NPTN is designed to address, and it is why we at tmGroup were glad to be part of the network alongside them.
So where do property searches fit into this, and why does it matter that they are part of the network?
Informed decisions
Searches are too often treated as a step that happens after the transaction is underway, ordered reactively once a case is opened rather than available to inform decisions earlier in the process. That timing creates a structural problem. If a search reveals a problem several weeks into a transaction, the damage is already done. Time has been spent, expectations have been set, and now everyone must regroup.
Getting search data earlier in the process, ideally before a buyer is fully committed, changes that. It means the conveyancer can advise confidently, with full information. It means potential issues are known quantities rather than late surprises, and it means fewer transactions collapse for reasons that could have been identified much sooner.
tmGroup processes more than 1.2 million searches annually and works with a significant proportion of the conveyancing community. Our role in NPTN is to make that data available within the network in a way that is authenticated, reusable, and accessible at the right point in the transaction, rather than locked inside individual case files.
It is a point our CEO, Matt Green, is clear about:
“We’ve spent over 25 years helping conveyancers get the right data at the right time. NPTN is the first initiative we’ve seen that addresses the structural reasons why that’s so hard to do
consistently across the whole market.”
Real results
This is an ambitious project. The network is built to be genuinely open, accessible to any law firm, lender, estate agent, or technology provider. That matters because a network that works only within a closed ecosystem has limited impact.
With the government signalling its support for reform of the home buying process, the direction of travel is clear. The housing secretary backs this initiative, the industry has the infrastructure, the will, and now the evidence from the NPTN pilot that this approach can deliver real results.
We are involved because we think it is the right thing to do for the industry and for the people who use it. Property transactions should not take five months. They should not fall through at the rate they do. Getting search data into the right hands earlier is one concrete way to change both of those things, and NPTN gives us the mechanism to do it.
About the author
As a leading property data and technology provider for over 25 years, tmGroup specialises in digital conveyancing solutions that enhance efficiency and compliance for the commercial and residential property sectors. The company’s platform includes property searches, mapping services, post-completion solutions, and client onboarding technology. tmGroup serves thousands of law firms across the UK and is committed to making property transactions faster, simpler, and more transparent.
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