Housing minister calls for a digital revolution in the property sector

October 22, 2019

The Housing Minister, Esther McVey, is) announcing plans today which will see the release of data held by local bodies to enable the UK PropTech sector to thrive and for them to “bring about a digital revolution in the property sector.”

The Housing Minister will announce measures to:

  • Open up Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) data for the first time in a transparency drive and enable PropTechs to obtain things like energy performance certificates and the square footage information of properties.
  • Introduce a national index of all brownfield data, simplifying and improving the quality of Brownfield Land Registers to help developers to find brownfield land to build on.

More info here.

Founder and CEO of Stone Real Estate, Michael Stone, commented:

“Any initiative to open up land supply and provide greater transparency within the house building process should be welcomed. After all, we’re building 200,000 new homes a year nationally while the reality is that we need to deliver 300,000, so that’s some deficit that needs to be addressed.

However, whilst the Housing Minister’s announcements today on promoting digitisation and better brownfield site identification will be welcomed, perhaps they should go a step further and start mandating that public land is also utilised more readily.

There’s an ironic reality that while the Government has failed to bolster house building via a number of recent initiatives, a very real solution remains right under their nose.

The swathes of untapped land that could be used to develop and deliver more homes are largely controlled by the very public sector that is responsible for, you guessed it, building these homes in the first place.”

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