Transaction time slashed to 11 days by digital conveyancing

A digital platform claims its taken “a massive step” towards speeding up property sales with what it says is the first fully digitised end-to-end property transaction up to the point of contract exchange. 

It has involved a new-build apartment in Stevenage and took 11 days.

The firm, Yourkeys, says its process reduced the time to reach exchange of contracts from the industry average of 63 days, down to just 11. 

The company claims its platform is the first to offer ”a full, end to end service, for all stakeholders involved in the buying and selling of new build homes” and insists that its service creates greater transparency, consistency and savings throughout the buying process.

“The problem is that there are lots of companies involved in each transaction and their systems don’t talk to each other. We saw the opportunity to build a data layer that pulls together inputs from everyone involved in the process” says the digital platform’s chief executive, Riccardo Iannucci-Dawson.

He says over 2,500 companies are directly integrated into the platform and claims that ID verification, anti-money laundering checks, mortgage applications and dozens of different documents are pulled together “in minutes.”

Companies involved in the exercise included The Conveyancing Association, Mortgage Advice Bureau, HM Land Registry, Search Acumen and others. 

The property concerned was a new-build apartment on a development by MBU Capital in Stevenage. 

MBU’s sales director Peter Beard says: "This is revolutionary, not only for us but for the market in general. The problem with the sales process has always been that there are too many people involved with no oversight of what’s happening.”

Yourkeys says it is currently focussed on the new build sector but believes that its technology will be adapted for the second-hand market by the middle of 2020.

“We’re aiming to complete 10,000 transactions nationally in 2020 with at least 60 per cent coverage of all legal firms and IFA’s, and that includes the second-hand market. We already have some big nationwide companies ready to trial this new functionality, so it’s very exciting times” says Iannucci-Dawson.