In my previous article, I pointed out the importance of provenance in using data to make decisions. However, provenance is only part of the issue we face. The property assessment process is, at its heart, a point-in-time judgement. A valuation, a survey, a lending decision are all made based on what is believed to be true at a specific moment, using the facts available at that moment. That sounds robust enough until you start to pull at the thread of what “true” actually means in a system where information moves slowly, processes run in parallel, and reality has a habit of changing between one checkpoint and the next.

Before we even get into questions of verification or data quality, there is a more fundamental issue about how do you know the information you’re relying on is still current? How do you know the circumstances haven’t changed? Planning permission, building regulations, remediation works, structural issues – all operate on different timelines, logged in different systems, often with long delays between an event happening and that event becoming visible to the wider market.

That gap between reality and record is becoming more problematic, not less. Whether searches of title information. the system struggles to check, in real time or even near-real time, who holds what security, when and for exactly what. The faster the transaction, the wider the opportunity for misalignment.

What sits underneath all of this is a deeper structural issue that property data is not linear. Planning permission may be granted on one date, but nobody really knows when – or if – the permitted works have been carried out until another event occurs later. Building regulations may confirm something different, at a different point again.

Even when the data is accurate, it is accurate at different times. One dataset may correctly state that planning permission was granted on a given date. Another may later confirm completion, remediation or compliance. Both are true, but only within their own temporal frame. The difficulty is linking those artefacts together so that users understand not just what is known, but when it was last known to be true, and for what purpose.

That leads to the question of provenance and relevance. Not all data needs to be equally verified for all uses. An electrical safety certificate may be irrelevant noise in one context and mission-critical in another. A landlord cares deeply whether it is up to date; a homeowner or lender may not. Without discipline, systems risk becoming overloaded with information that is technically accurate but operationally distracting.

The push for ever-greater transparency and data availability in banking and property is understandable, even desirable. But more data does not automatically mean better decisions. Without context, time-stamping, and clarity about appropriate use, it can just as easily slow processes down, obscure material risks, or create a false sense of certainty.

The real challenge isn’t collecting more property data. It’s understanding the truth of a thing, when that truth was last verified, and whether it is fit for the decision being made right now. Until systems can reconcile those timelines more effectively, property will remain what it has always been: an asset defined as much by what we don’t yet know as by what we think we do.

James Ginley, Technical Surveying Director at e.surv Chartered Surveyors