HM Land Registry reveals details of faster, more automated conveyancing

The HM Land Registry has revealed more details of long-term plans to improve and speed up conveyancing processes in a five year business strategy.

The Registry says that the increasing availability of online property information services and digital changes to how estate agencies operate has prompted it to respond with “a consistently high quality multi-channel experience” - in other words, providing faster and better information to help speed up and simplify residential transactions. 

“Over the five-year strategy we will find more ways to make it straightforward for conveyancers to submit applications to HM Land Registry, and will explore with the industry how we might reduce the need to delay applications as we seek further information, known as requisitions” the organisation says in its new strategy document.

“We will also look at how we can better support conveyancers through customer training and education programmes alongside exploring shared customer pathways to remove duplication of effort and simplify the registration process” it continues. 

The document reveals that the organisation handles around 20,000 applications to change the Register each day: 18,000 are straightforward and 2,000 are more complex. “In addition, we process approximately 100,000 register query requests and searches every day, most of which are already automated” it says.

The Registry says it plans to digitise and automate 95 per cent of its daily transactions by 2022 - up from 81 per cent according to the latest figures dating from 2016. 

“We will do this by focusing on automating the most straightforward updates and aspects of the complex processes where possible and beneficial. This will save experienced caseworkers from needless copy typing, data entry and repeat administrative work, freeing them to focus on exercising expert judgement on registration applications.”

You can see the full five year strategy for the HM Land Registry here.