The home buying roadmap puts real weight behind AI in the transaction: an AI Growth Lab opening to conveyancing this summer, digital identity, e-signatures. Good. The transaction needs it, at around 120 days on average from offer to completion and one in three sales falling through.
I've built in this exact space, and the lesson I'd offer anyone entering now is simple: bad data doesn't make AI fail. It makes AI confidently wrong, which is worse, because a system that fails gets fixed and one that's confidently wrong gets trusted.
Property data lives scattered across portals, registers, councils and PDFs, much of it stale. Point a clever model at that and you get faster retrieval of the wrong version.
So my advice to firms joining these pilots: don't start where AI looks most impressive. Start where your data is already strong, and let the boring consolidation work set the pace. The other order automates your errors first, at scale.
Fix the data first. The AI is the easy part after.
Co-founder of Propalt and a property investor and developer for 20 years
