Every player in the mortgage industry needs to pull together and collaborate to enable smart data to work for the homebuying process, according to panellists in the latest episode of MQube Live.

The panel discussed how smarter use of data could reduce delays, improve certainty and create a better experience for buyers, sellers and brokers.

Open Property Data Association chair and founder Maria Harris highlighted that there needs to be legislation, policy and regulation as well as work that industry and government need to do to make smart property data work.

Harris says: “Part of the complexity is that a lot of property data is sitting in government departments, such as land registry, ordnance survey, geospatial data and flood risk.”

“And lots of areas that we need to know about a property sit in local authorities and our local councils, like planning, highways, whether or not we’ve had an extension. Then lots of different industry providers including estate agents, mortgage intermediaries, mortgage lenders, valuers, surveyors, and conveyancers.”

She explains that all of these different players create a “complicated picture”, which means “everyone needs to pull together and collaborate for smart property data to work”.

Speaking from a lender’s perspective, Skipton Group head of home lending Simon Farrell-Roberts says while there has been innovation since the financial crisis in 2007, “we’ve come to accept that 30% of journeys collapse, but we can do something about that”.

Farrell-Roberts explains: “There’s a problem to solve from a customer perspective. We know customers want certainty and we want to give that certainty.”

“Right now, we’re giving the certainty to lend but it doesn’t give certainty to the entirety of the journey because we often find things or become aware of things later on in the journey, which can collapse the journey and the chain in its entirety.”

He adds: “There are some challenges, and we’re doing lots of things to address them. We often we do them in isolation as this gives us the chance to to look at the end-to-end journey.”

There are also challenges for brokers that need to be address. Smith & Pinching mortgage, equity release and protection specialist Lorna Hopes says there are more failings occurring post application which “adds a layer of complexity to the journey that is unnecessary”. She explains they could be avoided if a data pack was provided at the start.

Looking at it from a technology view, MQube chief executive Stuart Cheetham says the industry hasn’t moved forward since the financial crisis.

Cheetham explains: “We worked out giving lots of people mortgages without any proof of income was a bad thing. So what actually we did, which was a good thing, was we asked for lots more data, and at that point the industry started to say, ‘I need more data, I need more income and I need more property details to do all these sorts of things’.

“The whole industry got more and more complex through this process. So that’s kind of why we’ve almost gone a little bit backwards. At the heart of everything is data.”

“When you look at my world, I think about agentic AI, about blockchain and about tokenization. If we froze all technology innovation in those areas, that technology is so far advanced, we would be able to automate the entire mortgage journey if we got the data right.”

“But because we haven’t got the data right, that technology is being deployed badly, slowly and inappropriately. There’s other reasons there as well.

He highlights: “AI is kind of done. We do not need to see any more innovation in AI for it to do 80% of the mortgage journey. What we do need to do is we need to get the data right.”

He adds: “Data has moved and changed, while lenders, brokers and all these sorts of people, their technology stacks haven’t really kept up to date with forming that, which means you’ve got inconsistent data coming through from different sources, which needs to be rectified. You also need to understand the context of that data.”

Earlier this week at Mortgage Strategy’s MIT Live event, one of the key debates at the opening keynote panel discussion focused on why there are still long delays in the homebuying process given the increased adoption of technology.