The UK Government plans to digitise home buying & this will benefit Property Developers too, how?

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The average consumer is increasingly digitally literate and younger home buyers are 'digital natives' in that they're not expecting to be dealing with 'bits of paper' in a folder when buying a new home.

New property buyers expect access, then control of data with many aspects of their lives and their homes are no different. Residential property occupiers already use apps and services to manage their IOT devices, heating, lighting and entertainment. This growing familiarity with smart systems is increasing consumer appetite and expectation for data and this is beginning to impact builders of new homes.

People buying a property in 2025 are aware of how much digital information has been created about their new home both at the design and as-built stages. It is no longer tenable to fob them off with a pack of user manuals and some warranties. Whereas much of this information would have previously been held in paper, PDF or ‘unconnected’ IT systems, homebuilders have begun the digitisation of the traditional handover pack into a variety of online forms including apps and developer portals. Related to the this, here's a 'LINK' to how the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government plans to make Home Buying/Selling to become quicker and cheaper.

Chimni’s recent ‘RE-INVENTING BIM’ project took a new look at how home-buyers expect to receive information on their buildings and the ways it can be delivered to them in an understandable or usable way. Funded by Innovate UK, the study started with homeowner behaviour. The team looked at the kinds of activity that homeowners get up to when running and maintaining their homes, and how better information could improve it. Chimni also looked at which formats should information be delivered in order to make it most useful to them and the the results were published in the white paper - The DATA Home.

A new area that emerged was the data that is increasingly required by the development or mortgage finance and regulatory industries. In the post-Grenfell world, there is a huge emphasis on homeowners knowing what their homes are made of and being able to pass that on to finance and insurance companies. In the same vein, the growing emphasis on NetZero means homeowners need to be informed about their home’s energy performance and the nature of the materials used to build it.

An obvious area that came through the research was the need for home-owners to have access to layout and dimension information that they can be shared digitally with furnishing companies, tradesmen and other online services. Homeowners wanted interactive floor plans, dimensioned layouts and building data that they could feed directly into other company’s apps. Residential property buyers wanted maintenance information delivered in formats that are consistent with the way they manage the rest of their lives - including calendar invites, notifications, links to FAQs and shareable specifications.

Many of the data sets that both SHEDyt and Chimni identified as core to this new homeowner experience can be created by suppliers or product vendors. In this new world, the information has to be opened up and held in connectable, open-web formats. The role of the developer will be to find ways to pass it on in formats and services that make sense to homeowners. We believe that digital Property Logbooks like Chimni will be central to this process.

Property Logbooks provide homeowners with a home management dashboard and secure data store, ideally in real-time. They are an evolutionary step beyond the developer portal and are a ‘digital asset’ that grows over time to be relayed to future owners on sale. Reference to a property logbook as a ‘related digital asset’ is now included in the data schemas being developed by the conveyancing sector too.

A key finding of the ‘Re-Imagining BIM’ project was that it is possible to link property logbooks to construction software and developer portals. So that the creation and handover of Property Logbooks can be part of a digital workflow yet it requires data planning at the beginning of the construction process.

As BIM gets adopted these integrations will be simpler and the flow of data more seamless.

The first step is to recognise that data is now a core part of the ‘product’ not an add-on or customer service feature. Housebuilders can recognise this responsibility to their buyers and hence improve their brand credibility. Digital Property Logbooks not only deliver against this data requirement but also add a valuable new feature to a newly constructed home. Is it time for the humble housebuilder handover pack to grow up and become the home management app that buyers will increasingly expect? 

Want to know more about how you, as a Property Deevloper, can benefit from a Digital Logbook? Then get in touch for a DEMO or REGISTER and start digitising your hand-over building information today.