I've spent time this month with the government's home buying roadmap, and the line that stays with me isn't the sales packs. It's the "smart data" scheme: letting property information move securely between firms at the customer's request.
That quietly reverses twenty years of industry economics. The value sat in holding data, not sharing it. Movement was friction, and friction was the business model.
I know that friction well. A lot of my working life has been spent getting data out of systems built to keep it in.
So here's what I think firms are underestimating. The most exposed aren't the ones with poor data. They're the ones whose business quietly depends on data not moving. The roadmap doesn't just ask them for an export. It asks them to dismantle what they priced as the asset.
It's why Propalt AI runs on open standards, connected via MCP, portable if you ever leave. Holding data was the old moat. Moving it is the new one.
Co-founder of Propalt and a property investor and developer for 20 years
