At the end of August, HM Land Registry started publishing property identifiers alongside its monthly Price Paid Data for England and Wales. Unique Property Reference Numbers for individual addresses, INSPIRE IDs for land parcels, free at the point of use, in the same file as the prices.
It got very little attention, which is about right for plumbing.
For as long as this industry has had software, it has identified a property by its address, as text. Flat 2, 14 Bridge Street. 14A Bridge St. 14 Bridge Street, Flat 2. Three strings, one home, and no system can be certain they are the same place.
That is the mechanical reason two tools give you different answers about the same house, and why sold price history sometimes attaches to the wrong front door. Not bad data. Unmatched data.
Conveyancers have had a workable answer to this for decades, because a registered property carries a title number, and when the address and the registered description disagree the number wins. The rest of the market has been working without an equivalent.
At Propalt we resolve every property to a single canonical identifier, back-filled from eight official registers. Coverage is 29 million properties across England and Wales. A permanent public identifier in the price data still leaves that resolving work to be done. What it adds is that somebody else can check the answer, and that is the part that has been missing.
So the question is whether the systems you already pay for can hold one, and whether they will accept one that came from outside. If they cannot, you will carry on matching on address text while the public data underneath you gets steadily more precise than the tools reading it.
Co-founder of Propalt and a property investor and developer for 20 years
