Case Study - Industry Data Standards

Client:

Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate. OSCRE is a not-for-profit market led initiative that facilitates increased business productivity through the development and delivery of standards across the real property sector.

Problem:

OSCRE had predominently concentrated on developing data integration standards for commercial property. They were expanding their remit into the residential property market and were seeking a suitably skilled consultant to manage two industry workgroups - Lenders Conveyancing Workgroup and Residential Conveyancing Workgroup.

Solution:

OSCRE initiated two workgroups with representatives from Lenders (Halifax, Nationwide, Newcastle BS), Solicitors, Licensed Conveyancers, Panel Managers and Case Management system suppliers. Because of his experience with electronic messaging standards and his knowledge of residential property systems, Andrew Chilcott of stpsolutions was appointed as the Workgroup Manager with responsibility for capturing the business processes described by the workgroup participants and integrating these into the formal standards methodology utilised by OSCRE.

The workgroups met regularly to define all of the generic processes involved in (a) exchanging data between Lenders and the conveyancer acting for the Buyer or the Seller; and (b) exchanging data between the Conveyancer acting for the Buyer and the Conveyancer acting for the Seller and (c) exchanging data with third-parties such as Land Registry, HMRC or Estate Agents. The data exchanges in (a) and (b) were then further defined and described before being integrated into the overall OSCRE data model for real estate.

Outcome:

• Having completed its strict methodology for public review, OSCRE has published two sets of standards.

• Lenders wishing to automate their interfaces with multiple solicitors or panel managers now have an OSCRE standard to which they can build.
• Solicitors and Panel Managers have an OSCRE standard which will, once the standard is widely adopted, provide interoperability with Lenders and other Solicitors.
• Case Management system suppliers now have an OSCRE standard that can be built into there systems to generate wider adoption of the standard.