Why we've focussed on home buying

Buying a house is slow. Home buyers are usually kept in the dark for long periods and property transaction lawyers (AKA conveyancers) spend 60% of their time being chased up. After all that, 1/3 of purchases fall through. The buyer misses out and the conveyancer can’t claim their (full) fees.

No wonder “divorce” and “death” are the only things people say are worse than home buying.

To add insult to injury, buying a home - from offer to completion - takes longer now than ever before. This is despite decades of sector-specific technology adoption. This is only getting worse as the sector is experiencing record-breaking numbers of professionals transitioning out of conveyancing.

Long story short; home buyers hate the home buying process and conveyancers hate being the one’s left holding the bag.

This can be better!

The main cause of frustration for everyone involved in buying a home today is the time that it takes waiting for ‘searches’ to come back (33%-66% of total time). But why? The data is available - no one is trying to hide it. We live in a world of elaborate computer systems and the mighty power of “the cloud”. In any other industry this sort of thing wouldn’t take longer than 5 minutes to do. So why is it taking up to 12 weeks for home buying?

Right now, as things stand today, most data suppliers operate the same way as they have done for decades past. Any technology has merely shifted the work from paper to screens, but the process hasn’t fundamentally changed at all. A typical data supplier employs teams of data analysts to extract data from their database at a hyperlocal level for each case presented to them. They then do some final checks and transfer that data into a report. Naturally, working on a case-by-case basis results in a backlog of work. So, even though it may only take 30 minutes for them to do the research, that case might be 100^th in the queue.

MyNestBox, on the other hand, indexes property data up front so that “searches” return instantly. We call this process “Know Your Place”, or _KYP for short. This enables instant searches and live updates for property lawyers. It also facilitates 40% more completions for the conveyancer, 25% less chasing and an average uplift in revenue of £1.7m each year.

In the past 2 months we have demoed our prototype to many conveyancing firms. All have been impressed at the speed with which the platform is able to return data to them, and all immediately saw the step-change in the home-buying process this enables. Some of them even went as far as investing their own money in the business, such was their conviction in the product and team. This investment will help us build out our platform further, and enable us to achieve our goal of speeding up home buying by up to 12 weeks and, ultimately, make home buying near-to-instant.

We’re really excited about what we’re accomplishing. If you feel the same way, let’s chat.