Six vendors to one

The integration you maintain is six integrations wearing a trench coat

One schema, one invoice, one security review, instead of six of each.

Propalt Team · For PropTech platforms

A property platform rarely buys data once. It buys ownership from a Land Registry reseller, energy ratings from an EPC vendor, values from an AVM provider, address resolution from a lookup service, transactions from a market feed and area statistics from a demographics source. Six vendors, six auth schemes, six rate limits, six sets of field names for the same postcode. Every one of them is a contract your legal team signed, an endpoint your engineers wrote a client for, and a supplier your security team has to assess.

The honest counterpoint is that each of those vendors was chosen for a reason, and best-of-breed has a real appeal. But the cost of six best-of-breed sources is not the sum of six licence fees. It is the integration surface: six failure modes, six renewal dates, six schemas your data model has to reconcile, and six annual security reviews. Consolidation trades a marginal loss of specialisation for a large reduction in the code and the process you carry. For most platforms that is the better trade, and it is the one worth costing explicitly.

The hidden cost is the reconciliation layer

The licence fees are visible. The reconciliation layer is not. When ownership calls a property one thing and the EPC vendor calls it another and the AVM keys on a third identifier, someone on your team writes and maintains the code that stitches them together. That code is where the bugs live: a postcode format that one vendor accepts and another rejects, a property that resolves in five sources and returns nothing in the sixth. Every schema you add multiplies the join logic.

One contract collapses that layer. Every field in the Propalt data comes back under one schema, keyed consistently, documented in a single OpenAPI 3.1 spec. get_property returns ownership, get_epc_fabric_by_postcode returns energy fabric, and get_valuation_by_property_id returns value, all resolving against the same property records so the join is done for you rather than by you. Your data model maps to one source of truth instead of arbitrating between six.

The comparison above is illustrative of a typical stack. The specific vendors vary; the shape of the saving does not.

One security review, not six

Every data vendor your platform depends on is a supplier your security and procurement teams have to assess, and reassess at renewal. That work does not appear on any engineering ticket, but it is real, and it recurs. Six vendors means six questionnaires, six data processing agreements and six sets of sub-processor disclosures to keep current. Consolidating to one source turns that recurring six-way exercise into a single assessment against a single uptime commitment and a single processing agreement.

Every vendor you remove is a schema you stop reconciling and a review you stop repeating.

The invoice tells the same story. One monthly figure, with per-endpoint credit pricing you can attribute to features, replaces six line items you have to reconcile against six usage dashboards. Finance sees one supplier; engineering maintains one client; security assesses one processor. The consolidation is not only cheaper to run, it is simpler to reason about, and simpler systems are the ones that stay up.

Consolidate the contracts and the reconciliation layer disappears with them.

Try the Six vendors to one → · propalt.ai

Data is drawn across 29 million England and Wales properties from 8 authoritative UK registers plus the Propalt intelligence layer. Figures shown are illustrative. This article is general information for platform teams.