EDITION 22
Main Feature
Working together better in a truly digital property market
By Dan Salmons, CEO Coadjute
Dan Salmons, CEO at Coadjute addresses 1,000 of the UK’s top property professionals at The ESTAS
Friday 20th October saw some of the UK’s best agents, conveyancers, mortgage brokers and suppliers descend upon the Grosvenor hotel in London for the prestigious ESTAS Customer Service Awards sponsored by Coadjute.
The theme was Working Together Better, and what a wonderful sight it was to see so many different property professionals brought together in the name of cooperation and collaboration. It’s the passion for what you all bring to your work that makes you stand out and ultimately makes your clients satisfied as well.
But we as an industry shouldn’t be having to rely on your excellence and regularly going the extra mile to get clients what they want and need – a completed transaction. There has to be a better, more sustainable and long-term solution for us all. We need to make working together better the norm, not the exception.
Working together better in a digital property market
Take a step back and imagine a very different transaction process from the one we have grown accustomed to. Imagine a fully digital property transaction, the likes of which we have talked and dreamed of but never been quite able to deliver.
In a truly digital property market both businesses and users would experience a unified journey where there would be no need to log in to separate systems, no need to re-identify or re-key information, or repeat the same processes with different parties, and there would be a single and common view of truth. This vision isn’t an impossibility, it’s achievable.
In order to make the idea of an end-to-end digital transaction a reality there are a few things that we as an industry need to adopt first:
Open and accessible data
The property market is awash with data, however, when you look at the pain points of buying and selling property, 99% of issues faced – the time it takes, the lack of control, the lack of visibility, sharing the same information multiple times to multiple parties – they all come down to the fact that data is fragmented. Everyone already has the information, yet it cannot be easily accessed or shared.
Buyers and sellers deserve to have a property market that operates seamlessly end-to-end, which can only be achieved with data that is open and FAIR – findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable – wherever it is stored, whatever system they use. Besides, all of us in the industry share the same goal: to complete transactions as quickly and efficiently as possible. But achieving this hinges on one thing — making the right data available to the right people, in the right format, at the right time.
An end to the repetition with digital identification
The current process of proving your identification during property transactions certainly leaves a lot to be desired. We’ve happened upon a highly siloed and repetitive process where different digital ID providers work with different professionals meaning consumers perform the same checks again and again and operate through a labyrinth of scanned documents. And if that’s not bad enough, the process of digital identification doesn’t actually produce anything digital, a verified PDF is digital in name only.
The great thing is the technology already exists to break this cycle. Were biometric verifications to become the new norm then digital identities that are fully interoperable and verifiable would reduce the repetition almost overnight.
Tokenised money and titles
Tokenised money and titlesDespite the shift to online banking, moving money is risky, complex, manual and prone to errors - we’ve all heard the horror stories of fraud taking place at the point of completion. Digitised deeds are trapped in siloed databases at HMLR, requiring significant manual processes for both HMLR and buyers and sellers.
One of the suggested options to bring money and titles to a fully digital state is through tokenisation, whereby both money and property ownership can be represented as blockchain-based tokens in a completely digital format. Digital money and deeds in this format would revolutionise transactions, being completely programmable for money and deeds to exchange at any desired date or time.
Smart(er) contracts
Take your paper-based contracts, or PDF documents and cast them aside! Instead, imagine a contract running as a program on highly secure blockchain technology rendering it effectively self-executing, meaning things happen automatically when specific conditions are met.
A smart contract could specify that at the point of completion, insurances are automatically triggered, and an outstanding debit is cleared by the mortgage advance – a programmable contract. Every step from start to finish is documented and verified within the smart contract, which not only reduces human error but also helps to build trust and confidence in the process.
Orchestration – the digital backbone
The lynchpin connecting everything together.
All these components mentioned so far, accessible data, digital identity and signatures, tokenised money and titles, and smart contracts are necessary for a digital property market, but they are not sufficient to create one.
Orchestration is the missing piece of the digital property market puzzle. A market-wide infrastructure and intelligent backbone that connects systems and orchestrates the exchange of data throughout the property market. Similar to how the telecommunications networks we know and use daily for the transfer of data and calls from one mobile device to another, orchestration efficiently coordinates the various tasks, activities, and events in a property transaction. It brings together the different business processes of parties involved into a seamless digital journey, achieved by connecting their systems and data through a shared digital interface.
Making the digital property market a reality
Once these necessary components including open data, digital identity, tokenised money and titles, and smart contracts are in place, and all connected to interact seamlessly with one another through orchestration, the property transaction will be unrecognisably accelerated. We will then see the truly unified digital journey and experience the market has been striving towards for so long.
It is an incredibly exciting time for us as we see real technology innovation in the property industry isn’t 10 years away, Coadjute is doing it right now.
Find out more about the digital property marketESTAS winners have their say…
It was a double celebration at the 2023 ESTAS Awards three weeks ago, as this year we marked our twentieth birthday and the hailed the best of the best from the property industry.
Although it’s been a somewhat challenging twelve months, the cream really has risen to the top and over the last year the bar for excellent customer service has been raised still further, meaning that each and every one of our Grand Prix winners richly deserve their titles given the stiff competition. ESTAS isn’t just for the estate and letting agents of the UK, we also shine a light on the conveyancing and mortgage broker sectors. We wanted to understand what winning means to the companies that put in the hard yards and late nights to walk away with their trophies, so we asked some of our Grand Prix winners from the Conveyancing and Mortgage Broker categories to share their thoughts with us…
TV presenter Phil Spencer announced the top conveyancers at the 20th ESTAS Awards
AV Rillo Conveyancing won the Best National Conveyancer in the UK award, the latest accolade to join the silverware in their ever-expanding trophy cabinet. Tony Piccirillo, Co-Founder and Partner explained what winning this year meant to him and his colleagues.
‘The ESTAS awards are special because they are entirely based on consumer feedback’
“For us, everything is about engineering marginal gains, as you never really know why you don’t win a client or an agent referral, but having our ESTAS awards to our name really does make the difference. In an environment where every advantage counts, being able to demonstrate consistent levels of excellence is a huge benefit for us and that’s what winning the Best National Conveyancer award this year really communicates. It demonstrates that we actually care about both our clients and our agent partners. One of our internal standards is to be ‘world class’ however it’s difficult to benchmark this ourselves. The ESTAS awards are special because they are entirely based on consumer feedback, which provides us with the most important benchmarking process of all.”
Tony concluded, “Winning this award means that our staff feel ‘seen’ for all their hard work over the past year, which then encourages them to continue with their efforts. Winning awards at The ESTAS is great to retain and recruit good people, because they illustrate to any potential new recruits that when they join us, their work is valued both internally and externally. I’m so proud of all of them for contributing towards our success.”
‘Affinity Group receive the Gold ESTAS Grand Prix trophy for the first time’
From the financial services sector, Affinity Mortgages scooped the 2023 Grand Prix Best Mortgage Broker Office in the UK. Having been runners up in 2022, Jamie Lewis, Managing Director, Affinity Mortgages was delighted with his teams’ achievement. “Our award this year really has blown us away, as we’ve never won Gold at the ESTAS previously” said Jamie. “Coming away with Silver last year, which was of course amazing, meant that our focus after the 2022 event was very much ‘we want to win gold in 2023’, so for our team to work consistently towards that goal over the last twelve months and achieve it has been a massive boost for us, as it’s a direct result of the collective efforts and hard work of everyone who works with us.”
Jamie added, “We’ve been working with the ESTAS to collect customer reviews since 2016 and they are now so important to our business that we target our team to collect them. That’s because the reviews we gather are highly valuable to me as a business owner, as they provide me with a way to understand how good our service is and to ensure we consistently maintain our high standards. The ESTAS Reviews platform enable us to drill down to identify any issues internally and also showcases excellence externally, which is what makes it so unique.”
However, this year the ESTAS have supported our mortgage broker clients in a new and unexpected way as Jamie explains, “Over the past few months, using the ESTAS Reviews tool has also really helped in supporting our Consumer Duty processes, a new set of regulations introduced at the end of July this year that all mortgage brokers now have to adopt. Although we’ve always had value and consumer experience at the heart of our proposition since day one, the ESTAS platform plays a key part in ensuring that we’re meeting and exceeding these new industry standards.”
Thomas Legal, the Gloucester based property lawyers walked away with the Grand Prix Best Conveyancer Office in the UK. We caught up with Chris Barry, Business Development Director, Chris told us, “The ESTAS is the only review platform we use for two main reasons; firstly, it’s consumer friendly, easy to use and provides us with the opportunity to garner honest feedback from our clients. We send it out following our ‘congratulations’ call when clients have completed and find that a high number of them respond and provide their reviews. Secondly, the fact that the client can easily convert their feedback into a Google review is a huge advantage for us, as it really helps our SEO which in turn, increases online awareness and generates new enquiries.”
Thomas Legal Gloucester receive their Grand Prix ESTAS award in front of 1,000 of the UK’s top property professionals
‘ESTAS is now such a recognised brand, it’s a mark of excellence when other property professionals are conducting their due diligence on us’
Chris continued, “Although there are lots of industry awards in the legal sector and equally, lots of customer review platforms, the ESTAS Awards are the only accolades that are entirely based on customer reviews; effectively, you live or die by the number of clients who provide us with their feedback and how they feel about the service they’ve received. These insights are so valuable, as they help us with the day-to-day management of our business, while the ESTAS brand enhances our marketing. We also find that, with approximately half of our business referred to us by our agent and mortgage broker partners, as the ESTAS is now such a recognised brand, it’s a mark of excellence when other property professionals are conducting their due diligence on us. That’s why, to say that we’re over the moon with our win this year would be an understatement.”
We’d like to say a huge congratulations again to every one of our winners and shortlisted firms…and as we always say, ‘if you want to win it you’ve got to be in it’ so with the countdown to the ESTAS 2024 now on, every review counts, so if you want to be lifting the silverware on stage next year, you know what you need to do, and we’ll see you in London in twelve months’ time!
You can see the full winners list here:
https://www.theestas.com/estas23-official-winners.To find out how you can benefit from using ESTAS click here:
https://www.theestas.com/join-estas.RECIPE OF THE MONTH
Autumn Simmer Pot
If like me, your favourite season is Autumn then this one is for you! As the nights start to draw in, there’s nothing better than getting cosy at home under a blanket with a candle and a simmer pot on the go, which fills your home with the most delicious autumnal scent. There really is no set recipe for this one – just fill a pot with water, but it on the stove to simmer and add a few ingredients to create a cosy autumnal aroma. When December comes around, add mulled wine spices for a Christmas kick!
Here’s what I put in mine:
- Apple and orange slices
- Cinamon sticks
- Cloves or any kind of mixed spice
- A chai tea bag for that extra autumnal boost
Let the pot sit and simmer whilst it fills your home with the most welcoming scent that will make you want to hibernate until next spring!
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