The UK's first national land and property database will help to end
gazumping in the property market by 2005, the head of the key
e-government project has claimed.
The online National Land Information Service (NLIS) uses the
National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) as its property
index.
It will fast-track land and property searches in the house-buying
process, according to Local Government Information House (LGIH), a
subsidiary of the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA). LGIH
also said that local authorities will reap £200m a year efficiency
savings by consolidating their address systems.
While property searches in some areas of the UK can take weeks NLIS
will provide searches within minutes, said Andrew Larner, head of
Information Age Practice and director of LGIH. "Now the fastest
property search process is just under one-and-a-half hours," said
Larner. "We anticipate that when it is fully up to speed it will be
two to three minutes, tops. Gazumping should be a thing of the
past," he added.
The National Association of Estate Agents welcomed the promised
improvements to the house buying process but said that gazumping
would continue unless the legal processes changed.
To create the national gazetteer councils must first each create a
local gazetteer, drawing together separate address systems. They
can then link to the national network. Council IT managers' group
Socitm has expressed concern about the cost of creating local
gazetteers, where councils foot the bill.
But the new system will save councils money by reducing their
support costs, said Larner. "Local authorities have different
departments, maintaining different lists to different standards.
One local authority could have 100 local address lists with up to
90 staff maintaining it," he said.
How it works
Property industry professionals and
solicitors submit pay-as-you-go requests to NLIS through channels
provided by private companies. They will pass on information
requests to the NLIS hub, run by US information specialist
MacDonald Detwiller and Associates. MacDonald Detwiller will
forward the information to the relevant agency, such as the Land
Registry or local authority, before passing it back through the
channel to the customer.