Introduction
1. CoPSO and the private search market are committed to delivering fast, efficient and value for money search services to inform both home buyers and their professional advisers. The search industry shares the Government’s objective of implementing e-conveyancing and striving for real improvements to the home buying process to avoid wasted costs and delays for consumers.
2. Offering alternatives to the way in which search data is collated and stored is central to realising these reforms and presents an opportunity for increasing the volume of searches delivered on an electronic basis. This will reduce the industry’s carbon footprint and generate a truly competitive market.
Market Overview
3. Data included in search reports is often held and maintained by public sector bodies, for example local authorities. These bodies are not only the gatekeepers of the data but are often providing search services in competition with private search firms. This has led to conflict and restrictions being placed on when the data can be accessed. In the local search sector, this position is now being addressed by the Government following an Office of Fair Trading Market Study which recommended that local authorities provide full access to data.
4. How data is held and subsequently made available is central to the way in which private search firms operate their businesses efficiently. In recent years, the private sector has begun to establish alternative models which include new data banks of information. This information is invariably publicly available under statute and is collated via a number of methods such as identifying notices published by local authorities in the local press and decisions reached by local authority committees and published on council websites. Collating this data is labour-intensive but allows search firms to reduce both the need to physically visit local authorities to collate data and the carbon footprint generated as a result of this.
HIPs Regulations
5. Schedule 6(1)(g) of the HIPs (No 2) Regulations 2007 provides that ‘records searched’ when compiling a local search for a HIP can be ‘derived from other records’ . This wording has been included to provide for the situation where data may not be directly stored and accessed via, for example, a local authority. When drafting the legislation, Government officials consulted with the private search sector and visited firms who were already involved in compiling separate data banks of search information. The Government wanted to recognise these developments and not stifle innovation via the wording included in the legislation.
6. The Search Code also includes requirements on data quality and states that firms must ‘provide search reports which include up-to-date information and an accurate report of the risks associated with the property.’
Regulatory Position
7. The major challenge in establishing data banks are in ensuring that the information is kept up-to-date at all times. This is currently done by constantly reviewing the search data published and amending records accordingly.
8. The Property Codes Compliance Board (PCCB), which monitors compliance of PCCB registered firms with both the Search Code and the HIPs Regulations as they relate to search firms, is looking at this issue and exploring how it can most effectively inspect firms undertaking data banking to ensure that the information is always current. Research has indicated that in some cases information stored on private data banks is more up-to-date than the information held on local authority records. This is because it can take councils longer to update their records following a committee decision, compared to the private sector amending their data banks.
Future Action
9. Data banking is becoming an established feature within the private search sector, for example, the environmental search draws on around 70 datasets which are then stored and improvements made to the information. This provides a real alternative to repeatedly visiting public sector bodies to retrieve the data every time a search is required and has delivered increased efficiencies as these searches are more likely to be electronically compiled and delivered. This innovation benefits consumers as searches will be quicker and more efficient. The search industry and its regulators are also now taking a pro-active approach to ensure that data banking includes appropriate safeguards.
January 2008