A soon to be launched mortgage hub from Landmark Information Group aims to reduce the length of time it takes to reach completion on a house purchase.
The Landmark Connect Hubs, which will be launched later this year, will streamline communication between mortgage brokers, lenders, valuers and other stakeholders in the home buying process.
Speaking to FTAdviser, Landmark’s chief executive Simon Brown explained that he aims to have the open, accessible and standardised hubs up and running this summer.
Three core hubs are planned - one for brokers, lenders and values, one for conveyancers and one for estate agents.
“This is very much an evolution not a revolution,” Brown said.
“The idea is not to go big bang, where suddenly everything happens, because that's just stressful and tenuous for the industry.
“So instead, the idea is to bring people on one-by-one, in a phased way. We'll work with a number of leading brokers first - bring them on, show that it works - and then open it up to the rest of the industry.”
Landmark is for now, keeping its cards close to its chest.
Brown would not say which lenders or mortgage brokers have already been involved in the development of the hubs, but he is confident that once up and running they will “completely transform the market”.
“We have a market where buyers and sellers don't necessarily have a great journey.
“Currently it takes 133 days - 19 to 20 weeks - to buy and sell a house in England and Wales. It's a long journey and it's getting longer and a lot of it is due to this well known fact that the industry is largely disconnected in silos,” Brown said.
“You have mortgage providers, conveyancers, lenders, agents, all of whom are either regulated or have specific codes of conduct which require certain behaviour but they're all different. So they do what they do, and they do it well, but they're not necessarily connected together.
“And it became obvious, especially coming from outside the industry, that we need to do something about this.”
Brown said that as a starting point, Landmark, which has nine different businesses working across the property transaction process, began manually connecting its businesses to one another better.
As a result of this, it was able to shave its average completion length down by four weeks.
“So substantial reductions just by connecting businesses and moving data better,” Brown said.
“And so this became the key - let's make sure that everyone doing their jobs has the right information at the right time. And so if we can connect our own businesses, actually, we can use the same principle to connect the industry as a whole because we deal with all these different people all the time.”
Making homes liquid assets
Since last autumn, Landmark has been successfully trialling an upgrade of its existing secure panel network where lenders arrange valuations with the surveyors.
“We do roughly two million property valuations a year. We've done this for over a decade, in an exceptionally secure environment. It just does the job quietly in the background connecting all these people together. So we took this and we upgraded the platform so now it can support rich data and documents rather than just the valuation data,” Brown said.
The goal is then to replicate this principle further across the other streams of the home-buying process.
“In doing this, we can make sure that the right information is put in the right place at the right time, upfront. We don't have to chase.
“The mortgage advisers don't have to go chasing post valuation queries and the lenders and the conveyances. The agents don't have to go chasing different stuff. We can just do it once and put the information quickly at the front of the process and if you do that, you'll actually collapse the time it takes to do the process.
“This is what we've been proving to ourselves,” Brown said.
“Fundamentally, if you begin to collapse this down and let's say we end up at four weeks as a transactional cycle, you end up with a situation where your house is a liquid asset rather than an illiquid one.
“And so more mortgage products begin to come to the fore like bridging loans and so on and so forth as chains disappear - and people just buy and sell houses, which is what happens in other markets.”
Landmark has said the new hubs will become operational in the summer of this year, with mortgage advisers paying a transaction fee to use the service.
Outlining the benefit a service like this would have for brokers, Brown said: "The transaction is faster for the broker - that's improved cash flow being absolutely honest and more turns per year. In other words, you get more revenue for the same number of people working."
jane.matthews@ft.com
