Giving evidence at the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Select Committee OPDA chair Maria Harris called for a government mandate, rather that voluntary initiative to speed up this process.

Harris was providing evidence alongside Kate Faulkner, chair of the Home Buying and Selling Group and Paula Higgins, chief executive of HomeOwners Alliance.

Harris said companies currently using OPDA’s data standard for digital property packs had significantly reduced the time it takes to get from an offer being accepted on a house to exchange of contracts. She said this had reduced to just 15 days “with zero fall throughs, zero fraud, a much better customer experience and more certainty around the moving date.”

In her evidence she added: “It is also taking hundreds of hours out of the process. If we had widespread adoption of standards and we digitised the data at source we would reform the [home moving] process dramatically.”

Harris called for home sellers to instruct a conveyancer right at the start of the process even before a property was listed. The Committee questioned the impact of this, and the conclusion was that it would significantly shorten the time period of a house purchase, while providing more certainty that a transaction is likely to go ahead. Where a similar process operates in Scotland it was revealed that there was very little, if any, drop off due to speculative sales.

The Home Buying and Selling Group also gave evidence on the complexity of the current process. CEO Kate Faulkner said there was a list of 300 things that the buyer, lender or removal company may need to know before they agreed to a house purchase offer. There were also potentially 15 companies involved in even a simple purchase.

Faulkner said: “We have fantastic runners in each sector, but we’re not good at passing that baton to each other. Sometimes you need to pass it forwards and sometimes backwards, but you only need one or two poor quality services in the middle, or a buyer or seller who doesn’t do something they need to, and suddenly the whole thing collapses.”

Harris added: “The entire process is siloed and fragmented. It is based on pushing bits of paper and documents about and manually checking identity, property details or validating information between different systems that don’t speak to each other. There’s nothing that underpins it, so it is really difficult to get the process from point A to point B, for anyone in the industry.”

Currently, less than one per cent of property information is available digitally. However Paris said full digitisation could happen within three years, but warns that the market needs to move collectively and take the same step at the same time.

She said that there is a precedent across other industries, and cited the travel industry, where, no matter which airline is used in whichever country, every airport uses the same three-letter code. The travel industry also has the same scanning system for bags, and same standards and structures for tickets and information, with everyone required to connect to Air Traffic Control.

She adds: “We don’t have that for the property industry. It’s actually quite staggering that for such an important purchase we don’t have that infrastructure.”

The OPDA is now calling for other organisations across the industry, from lenders and mortgage brokers, to estate agents and conveyancers, to join the OPDA to shape the way the digitisation process evolves.

Lloyds Bank was the latest organisation to join the OPDA last month.